Wikipedia:Why Manual of Style discussions are so awful

Discussions about what Wikipedia:Manual of Style and its sub-guidelines (hereafter "MoS") should say, or how/whether something they says should be applied to a particular topic, often turn into verbal brawls characterized by assertions without evidence, viewpoint-pushing, original "research", undue weight given to one or another primary sources (if any are provided at all), sometimes even promotion of fringey notions, all toppped off with incivility that increases the longer the discussion continues. This is all clearly contrary to Wikipedia policies. So what is going on?

Despite Wikipedians' inculcated habits of turning to reliable sources in a duly-balanced manner to ensure that any claim they make is verifiable, in MoS-related discussions the norm seems to be do no research at all and just pop off with an opinion (usually relying on prescriptivist notions about what is "proper", "right", "correct", "true", "required", "standard", etc., etc. – claims no linguist or other scholar of the language would ever agree with in most cases). Even in the rare instance a drive-by commenter does look for any sourcing at all, they usually cherrypick whatever style guide or other source agrees with their viewpoint and preference, and suppress any mention of ones that do not (and are apt to attack them if they are mentioned by someone else).

Root causes

There are identifiable causes of this unconstructive and sometimes disruptive behavior, and they basically boil down to everyday human biases and fallibility:

"Every so often, language scholars will point out the pitfalls of trying to follow arbitrary grammar rules from [traditions]. Their well-meaning interventions never fail to trigger red-hot outbursts from purists. Blog posts that touch even indirectly on style issues draw huge numbers of angry comments. People who've learned the traditional rules don't want to be told that those rules are confused or don't really matter. A command of the standard grammar rules is one hallmark of a good education and has been for centuries. For many people it's more than that – it's a sign of civic virtue."

— Rosemarie Ostler, Founding Grammars, St. Martin's (2015).

• Inflated sense of competence Anyone more-or-less fluent in the language has a self-deceptive sense of "mastery" with regard to it, a feeling that they have "innate expertise" with regard to English-language usage. In reality, of course, most of us have no linguistic or other relevant educational or professional background, nor any real experience in evaluating usage patterns across all the reliable source material. The Dunning–Kruger effect (when someone "doesn't really know as much as they think they do, and doesn't know what it is they don't know") runs rampant in such discussions.
  • Dogmatism: People just assume that what seems most appropriate or "normal" to them is necessarily the best (or only permissible/correct) way to write, and may be very insistent on it. This leads to many ipse dixit ("That's just the way it is!") pseudo-arguments. Some editors become very agitated about style matters, and can start wandering into negative assumptions about anyone who disagrees with them. A handful of users may even make it their mission to "correct" Wikipedia style out of a conviction that it is badly wrong. This is especially impractical and even insensitive since our internalized language norms vary widely by location, age group, social groups, and other factors.
• Early and narrow indoctrination: Most of what we know of our native language is learned in our childhood through teenage years (with insistence they were absolute and never-changing "rules", from teachers with insufficient background in the subject themselves, relying on outdated, insular, and dumbed-down textbooks). Second-language learners typically receive even narrower instruction.
  • Faith-based thinking That indoctrination has a powerful habitualizing and blind belief effect on many, a "there can be only one way" viewpoint which is difficult to shake or to break through. It may lead to an "invincible ignorance" problem, a refusal to accept any arguments and evidence that are contrary to what one learned long ago.
• Insider style: Later, many editors absorb new layers of professional and subcultural "these are the new and finer rules" prescriptivism through additional indoctrination processes. These style demands are often actually enforced or at least vigorously reinforced one way or another within those circles. This leads to two frequent problems:
  • Specialized style: Those focused on a topic subjected to professional or avocational/fandom specialization have a strong tendency to incorrectly argue that how specialists write for other specialists in that subject is how Wikipedia "must" do it, despite specialized writing having little in common with encyclopedic writing for a general audience. A faulty argument commonly offered is that Wikipedia will not look "professional" or "informed" if it doesn't exactly follow specialist practice, but of course Wikipedia does not exist to impress specialists, is not written with them as the primary audience, and mostly is not written by them. Another common argument is that specialist writing commonly capitalizing something automatically makes it a proper name, but this is not how proper naming actually works in this or any other language. A third common push from this sector is that specialist writing often uses capitalization to distinguish specific and major topics from inspecific and minor ones (e.g. the sport of "Baseball" from the object "a baseball", the "Green Salamander" species from "a salamander that happens to be green", and so on), so this means Wikipedia "must" do it also. But this is already covered by MOS:SIGCAPS, and the answer is always the same: we write more clearly and make judicious use of links.
    • Dumbing down: Countervailingly, some may argue vociferously against MoS recommending something that is a commonly accepted best-pratice in quality sources, even internationally standardized – just on the basis of it having originated in specialist writing, even though it has become common in non-specialized writing and poses no confusion risk to readers, despite not being the easiest/simplest possible approach.
  • "Issue" style: Those focused on a topic subjected to language-change advocacy (most often in identity politics, though there are many exceptions) frequently push for Wikipedia to adopt activist-recommended wording despite it not being in widespread use across professional writing in contemporary English. Wikipedia never "leads the way" in predicting the success of such a proposed usage shift, or "joins the fray" in advocating for it, and only adopts one after it has been conclusively proven to actually be a shift in general real-world usage. There is also often an appeal to novelty laced into such promotional arguments, usually disguised as "language changes over time" being misused as if it is an argument for a particular change or as evidence that it has occurred, instead of simply an observation that change can occur.
    • Preservative stonewalling: On the other hand, some may strongly resist Wikipedia recommending or even permitting a style that has demonstrably become normal in present-day English, and will use the appeal to tradition (often with various forms of argument to emotion about the perceived socio-political position of the other side), to deny language change. Sometimes fallacious slippery slope is also a factor: "If we accept this, then we'd also have to accept [absurdity here]." The "doesn't look professional" meaningless dismissal mentioned above is often employed here as well.
• Conflicting "authorities": English (unlike French and several other languages) lacks any form of centralized authoritative body that sets generally accepted rules for the language. All of the self-declared "authorities" producing style guides for English contradict each other on virtually every point (often along falsely nationalistic lines, but even within a single country no style guides agree on everything and few agree on much of anything).
  • Arbitrariness versus rationales: Many (possibly most) style matters are actually arbitrary, when it comes to general usage, without an intrinsic and objective superiority of one option over another. Their application within Wikipedia, however, often is not arbitrary: there are frequently good reasons within our context to prefer one option over another – most often clarity and precision, consistency with other rules, commonality across dialects, and simplicity, though other logical rationales may apply. This often makes for a conflict of Wikipedia-focused reasoning versus personal but arbitrary preferences. Various debaters may have difficulty understanding the difference, and often accuse anyone with a reader-facing rationale of just trying to advance their own arbirary preference despite all evidence to the contrary.
• MoS's actual purpose and scope: Many editors are confused about what MoS really is and why it exists, incorrectly believing it is or should be a comprehensive style guide that must comply with the recommendations of [that editor's preferred] off-site sources. MoS is a house stylesheet that only addresses what it must address to resolve conflicts and other problems, and leaves all other style matters to editorial discretion on an article-by-article basis (primarily concerned with consistency within a single article). It is based on consensus (informed by off-site style guides, though they rarely agree on anything), and always geared to the particular needs of this project and its audience. It is no way a public-facing "article", and Wikipedia does not give advice to the public so there will never be such an article here.
  • Demands for the "most common" style: Relatedly, many editors latch onto the "follow the sources" principle that underlies our encyclopedic content, over-extending it and making an argumentum ad populum claim that Wikipedia must follow the most commonly used style in external sources on a subject when Wikipedia writes about the topic. This is, of course, not a cogent argument: news journalism is reliable for the events of the Israel–Palestine conflict, entertainment journalism is reliable for the content and production of Marvel Cinematic Universe films, and medical-journal literature reviews are reliable on the diagostics of various forms of diabetes; but none of them are reliable sources of any kind on how best to write about any topic in encyclopedic English for a general audience. (The reliable sources for how to write such material well are style guides and other works on English usage and non-fiction writing, which we already consider in our MoS.) Much of this confusion is due to the WP:COMMONNAME policy for article titles, which means use the most common name for the subject, such as Sony not Sony Group Corporation, Sony Corporation, or Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo; it has nothing to do with how to style the most common name once that has been selected, and we do not write "SONY" to match the preferences of the company, as per the MOS:TM style guideline, because it is not done consistently by the vast majority of independent sources (a stricter requirement than COMMONNAME). Every attempt to shoehorn a style matter into the WP:Article titles policy has been met with stern community rejection.
  • WP rules do not answer to third parties: Ultimately, no source could possibly be more reliable for what Wikipedia needs for its own use than our own editorial pool's deliberated consensus. It is the only thing that forms our policies and guidelines. The misapplication of "follow the sources" as if it applied to the MoS guideline is never argued to apply to any other "Wikipedia:" namespace material. No one would dream of arguing that our civility policy, our core content policies, our "What Wikipedia is not" policy, our reliable sources guideline, our categorization guideline, our requested-moves or merge/split processes, our requests for adminship procedure, etc., etc., had to depend in any way on the published preferences of off-site writers. (The tiny handful of such internal material that is heavily dependent on externally defined requirements, like the WP:Copyright policy, were already written using the necessary sources, from the ground up.)

All of the above factors combine into a recipe for MoS discussions perpetually being hot messes of mutually incompatible but usually disprovable assertions of "fact" that are entirely subjective. After over twenty years, is appears that nothing can be done to change this. One thing is abundantly clear: the more personal punditry instead of researched fact and Wikipedia-focused reasoning that is offered, the worse things get, because the opinions provide heat not light.

What can even be done about it?

The main thing is to be aware of one's own biases, and lack of detailed knowledge about global usage across all of English writing. Avoid making assumptions, and avoid pressing any assumptions or preferences as facts or requirements. In a question about what the real-world usage is and by whom, if you don't have any researched facts to present, ask yourself what is practical about the input you are considering and what its motivation is. If you've done some research, did you do it broadly, or just cherrypick a source or two that support your view? If the question is about expanding, removing, or changing MoS wording, you will need an understanding of what effects this may have across our articles and in relation to other guidelines and policies. It is also important to approach other editors with an assumption of good faith; avoid hotheaded agument especially if it personalizes against another editor or perceived class of editors.

However, a mistake in the other direction is "both-sides-ism", treating every argument as if equally valid. If there are solid encyclopedia-related reasons to do things a certain way, these are objectively better rationales than personal preference, traditionalism, nationalism against commonality, specialized usage, political arguments, or commonness in non-encyclopedic writing. Adding argumentative noise in favor of any of the latter is not constructive.

Short-circuiting an in-progress verbal melee about style, to re-ground it in facts and reason, takes a lot of work and resources. Some of the things required are:

• Having on hand (or getting access to) a large pile of sources on contemporary English usage.
• Mustering the patience to go through and quote or summarize them accurately and fairly.
• Gaining a keen understanding of how the material in question interrelates with other policy and guideline material.
• Keeping a temperamental evenness to apply all the above dispassionately rather than in a counter-advocacy manner that inflames the discussion further.

Few editors have all of this plus the will to put it into action, especially since it will probably only contribute to resolving an internal dispute, not toward improving article content on English-language usage, unless they work hard to dual-purpose the research.

And even this approach only helps elucidate what might be (often proves not to be) a general off-site consensus on the question in style guides and other reliable sources on usage which could influence what we choose to do. It does not necessarily address internal questions of what Wikipedia should do for its own reasons, which include reader understanding, editorial buy-in, compatibility with other policies and guidelines, the "instruction creep" problem, technical and accessibility constraints, and often other factors.

See also

• Wikipedia:Manual of Style/FAQ
• Wikipedia:Manual of Style extended FAQ
• Wikipedia:Why Manual of Style talk pages have so much churn
• Wikipedia:If MOS doesn't need a rule on something, then it needs to not have a rule on that thing