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RfC: some italicisation questions regarding catalogues, sets, collections and types of creative works

1)For the initial questions, the community consensus has as following
  • Consensus has been reached for the following statements, which are therefore adopted:
  1. Catalogues indicated by a name that is not an actual book title are not italicized.
  2. Articles about a set of works belonging to the same genre, by a single author or composer should not be italicized.
  3. Articles about a particular collected edition of a composer or author should be italicized.
  4. Abbreviations of italicized titles should also be italicized.
  • The community's view is that German Magnificat should be italicized.
  • No consensus reached regarding Baedeker. There was minimal participation, so a separate discussion will be more appropriate.
  • No clear consensus reached regarding the common German word for an annex (to a catalogue etc.), and its abbreviation. It is leaning towards "italicize" however there has been minimal participation and argument that a non-expert reader cannot understand the meaning of terms "Anh" and "Anhang" or that these two terms should not be used if reliable English sources use the term "Annex" as well have emerged. Therefore, further discussion is needed in order to address these issues and reach clearer consensus.
2) The proposed addition to Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Titles#Series titles and the Proposed change for Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Abbreviations#Latin abbreviations must be discussed in separate centralized RfC discussion. --Kostas20142 (talk) 10:06, 3 August 2017 (UTC) (non-admin closure)

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

The first four of the questions below derive from a prior discussion at Talk:New Schubert Edition#Italics, the fifth was added after it turned up at Wikipedia:Featured article candidates' /Meine Seel erhebt den Herren, BWV 10/archive1:

  1. Catalogues indicated by a name that is not an actual book title:
    1. Hoboken catalogue or Hoboken catalogue?
    2. Deutsch catalogue or Deutsch catalogue (see, for instance, lead paragraph of Schubert Thematic Catalogue)?
  2. Articles about a set of works belonging to the same genre, by a single author or composer:
    1. Shakespeare's sonnets or Shakespeare's sonnets?
    2. Bach's first cantata cycle or Bach's first cantata cycle?
  3. Articles about a particular collected edition of a composer or author:
    1. Neue Mozart-Ausgabe or Neue Mozart-Ausgabe?
    2. Complete Works of Voltaire or Complete Works of Voltaire?
  4. Abbreviations of German expressions (see also somewhat related, i.e. for English titles of creative works, unresolved issue at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Abbreviations#italicization of acronyms/initialisms for otherwise italicized titles):
    1. NSA or NSA?
    2. BWV or BWV?
  5. Interpretation of WP:NCM#Key signature, catalogue number, opus number, and other additions to a composition's article title:
    1. German Magnificat, BWV 10 (like Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2), or German Magnificat, BWV 10 (like Italian Concerto, BWV 971)?

--Francis Schonken (talk) 10:29, 6 June 2017 (UTC)

Baedeker

I'd like to introduce a sixth question for the RfC (sorry for the late addition, just came across it now and seems to fit in the group of issues we're addressing here):

  2. Baedeker
    1. Baedeker's or Baedeker's?
    2. Baedeker Guides or Baedeker Guides?

--Francis Schonken (talk) 08:17, 8 June 2017 (UTC)

Not closely related - neither are titles of creative works, abbreviated or otherwise; neither should have italic. Batternut (talk) 21:58, 8 June 2017 (UTC)

Annex

Appending another question:

  2. Regarding the common German word for an annex (to a catalogue etc.), and its abbreviation:
    1. Anhang or Anhang?
    2. Anh. or Anh.?

--Francis Schonken (talk) 12:50, 8 June 2017 (UTC)

Input

For added question #6: I'd write Baedeker's and Baedeker Guides. --Francis Schonken (talk) 08:17, 8 June 2017 (UTC)
For added question #7: no italics in either case imho. --Francis Schonken (talk) 12:50, 8 June 2017 (UTC)
  • #1 & #3 would seem to qualify easily as major works whether the "correct" book title or not, #2 clearly not imo, #4 I'm unsure of, but should be consistent between composers, and #5 should certainly be italics (as should Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2). There has long been a divergence between the way that classical music articles interpret (or perhaps more accurately, ignore) MOS:MAJORWORK and MOS:MINORWORK, but the purpose behind the MOS' direction to use italics/quotation marks for titles, to make it very clear to readers when creative works are being referred to in running prose, should be applied through the project. ‑‑YodinT 11:16, 6 June 2017 (UTC)
    (ec) Re. #1 & #3: the distinction is not "correct" vs. "incorrect", but "actual" vs. "descriptive"
    • Descriptive: compare e.g. Catalogue of paintings in the National Gallery, London; actual: compare e.g. The Music of Francis Poulenc, the actual title of a published catalogue
    • Series: "actual" vs. "descriptive" are the qualifications which are used, literally, in the relevant guidance, Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Titles#Series titles, as the criterion to distinguish italicised from non-italicised. Note also, for instance, that the "series=" parameter of the {{cite book}} template does not italicise, while the "title=" parameter does. I do think that
      • Wolf, Uwe (1995). "Bach, Johann Sebastian: Meine Seele erhebt den Herren, BWV 10". Kantaten zu Marienfesten II. New Bach Edition (in German). Vol. Series I: Cantatas, Vol. 28/2. Bärenreiter. pp. 67ff. (Critical Commentary), 131ff. (Score). {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
    (without added italics for the "series" parameter) works better than
    with the series title italicised (less clear where the title ends and the series name begins). --Francis Schonken (talk) 12:54, 6 June 2017 (UTC)
  • #1 is not obviously the title of a major work--the full titles are, certainly (and also their obvious abbreviations e.g. Schubert Thematic Catalogue), so I think I would be fine with no italics. #2 are clearly descriptive article titles, so no italics. #3 are clearly names of works, so italics. Whether a work has an original name which is in a non-English language is irrelevant, so, the question regarding #4 would seem at first glance to indicate italics. However, the shorthand reads more often as identifiers rather than as the title. I'll pose no opinion on the point, but my inclination is slightly toward no-italics. #5 is not a question posed very well. --Izno (talk) 12:40, 6 June 2017 (UTC)
    (ec) Re. "#3 are clearly names of works" – no, they're not clearly the names of works: they are *editions* like First Folio (not italicised) refers to a particular edition, not a particular work of art. The First Folio article starts thus:
    • Mr. William Shakespeare's Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies is the 1623 published collection of William Shakespeare's plays. Modern scholars commonly refer to it as the First Folio.
    In comparison, I would write:
    • Johann Sebastian Bach's Werke: Herausgegeben von der Bach-Gesellschaft zu Leipzig is the 1851–1899 published collection of Johann Sebastian Bach's works. Modern scholars commonly refer to it as the Bach-Gesellschaft Ausgabe.
    Or, for the other collected edition:
    • Johann Sebastian Bach: Neue Ausgabe sämtlicher Werke is the 1954–2007 published collection of Johann Sebastian Bach's works. Scholars commonly refer to it as the New Bach Edition.
    --Francis Schonken (talk) 14:51, 6 June 2017 (UTC)
    Following your distinction above, First Folio is descriptive, not the title of the edition (which for the First Folio, as you say, is Mr. William Shakespeare's Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies). Neue Mozart-Ausgabe and Complete Works of Voltaire are the titles of specific editions, and as titles, can be styled either as minor or major works (and they're clearly not minor works!). Also interesting to note that Neue Mozart-Ausgabe is an abbreviated title from the full Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Neue Ausgabe sämtlicher Werke, both of which are currently in italics in the article; surely English translations of abbreviated titles (like the Bach example you give above) could also be considered titles. For what it's worth I don't think that trying to find a pattern in the current mess to demonstrate precedent is going to help, but I think your approach of trying to come up with a consistent solution (I think this is what you're doing?) seems a good idea! ‑‑YodinT 18:26, 6 June 2017 (UTC)
    Re. "First Folio is descriptive" – yes and no: if it were a descriptive article title (in Wikipedia sense) is should be sentence case (thus: First folio, or in running text "... first folio"), which it clearly is not. It is a proper name. To me it seems like these "short" names of editions (i.e. not the actual title of the edition) are generally capitalised but not italicised in the reliable sources on which we base our encyclopedia.
    Re. "... trying to come up with a consistent solution (I think this is what you're doing?)" – That might be the background idea, yes. Well, for instance, I wrote the intro of Franz Schubert's Works – when doing that I looked around how to apply italicisation. All I noticed is the utter confusion in practice and guidance, so I kind of concocted my own approach, based on what I saw in reliable sources. Going through the movements again when writing introductory paragraphs and table legends at List of compositions by Johann Sebastian Bach and List of compositions by Franz Schubert (etc). It would be better if there were a coherent guidance: less worries for the one writing article text. --Francis Schonken (talk) 06:18, 7 June 2017 (UTC)
  • #1 not italics per Izno. #2 not – obviously. #3 both italics as proper titles of major works. #4 italics per WP:ITALICS – "…or abbreviations thereof". I'm not sure about #5; IMO Magnificat (despited the styling there), should not be in italics, German Magnificat should be – analogous to Requiem and Messa da Requiem; same for rhapsody and Hungarian Rhapsody. -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 14:31, 6 June 2017 (UTC)
    Re. #4: currently we write Wie schön leuchtet der Morgenstern, BWV 1 and Fugue in G minor, BWV 1000 – I don't see that changing anywhere soon to Wie schön leuchtet der Morgenstern, BWV 1, and Fugue in G minor, BWV 1000. This is rather a reality check (how it is universally done in reliable sources), which might end in a possible fine-tuning of the guidance. Could you cite any English-language reliable sources that would write NSA when referring to the New Schubert Edition, or BWV when referring to the Bach-Werke-Verzeichnis? I could of course list plenty that don't italicise, and, as far as I remember, I never encountered a single one italicising either of these abbreviations. --Francis Schonken (talk) 15:56, 6 June 2017 (UTC)
    #4 as asked didn't provide any context. The discussion linked to focussed on abbreviations of works in running text, like "the BWV is is a catalogue of compositions" where it ought to be in italics. If used in composition titles (BWV 1), it has the function of "Op." and would indeed look odd if italicized. Re #3: Making a styling distinction in running text between BWV, BGA, NBA, NMA and their complete unabbreviated German titles seems like unnecessary pedantry to me. -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 00:57, 7 June 2017 (UTC)
    Re. "didn't provide any context" – for the first four questions I linked to Talk:New Schubert Edition#Italics as context. Quite ample context I'd say, don't know why we would rehash that entire discussion here, or why summaries of that discussion should be given here, but anyway, here you go: near the end of that discussion there was a link to some specific Wikipedia guidance about italicisation of Latin expressions (where indeed some examples are given that, in English, some common abbreviations of Latin expressions are not italicised, e.g. "e.g."), while the main guidance on italicisation of abbreviations only used English-language examples, and is not compatible with the Latin-specific guidance on the same. So, if looking at the context I indicated, my choice to treat this "by language" is amply explained. So, please give me some examples in English-language sources using NSA, BWV, D, K., Anh. or some such abbreviated German expression italicised in running text. Our intro of Köchel catalogue definitely looks odd (not to say amateurish) in that sense to me, not the way I'd encounter this in English-language running text elsewhere. --Francis Schonken (talk) 06:18, 7 June 2017 (UTC)
  • Case #1: never italic, as not actual titles,
  • cases #2 and #3: yes, italic where actually published titles,
  • case #4: not generally as just too pedantic; but yes use italic within the article or directly referring to it, as "Italics should be used for ..., or abbreviations thereof: Major works of art ..." of MOS:TEXT#Names_and_titles,
  • case #5: no, as qualifiers aren't usually italicised (eg Earth (Brin novel)), and also too pedantic and potentially confusing.

Batternut (talk) 10:38, 7 June 2017 (UTC)

  • I truly am at a loss on this one. Compare:
  1. Bach-Werke-Verzeichnis (abbreviated as BWV)
  2. Deutsch catalogue (abbreviated as D or D.)
  3. Händel-Werke-Verzeichnis (abbreviated as HWV)
  4. Köchel catalogue (abbreviated as K. or KV)
  5. Ryom-Verzeichnis (abbreviated as RV)
It's all over the place! there's no pattern or consistency of any kind. (I failed to find an italic title with an italic abbreviation to complete the set of four, but I wouldn't be at all surprised if there were one.)
There are multiple issues here, including:
  1. Italicisation or not of the names of authoritative catalogues such as those
  2. Italicisation or not of non-English words and titles
I suggest selecting model examples and seeking individual consensus on each of them. FWIW, and IMAO:
  1. Johann Sebastian Bachs Werke: Herausgegeben von der Bach-Gesellschaft zu Leipzig. An identified publication, so italics
  2. Bach-Werke-Verzeichnis. Plainface. It's a catalogue
  3. BWV. Plainface. Standard abbreviation for that catalogue.
  4. As for Anhang and Anh. - ptooey! (and then some!) to the academic discussion about italics or not. I happen know what "ein Anhang" is, but that is utterly irrelevant. If a reader finds Anhang or Anh. in an article in English Wiki, there is nothing to tell them what it means. Narky Blert (talk) 23:59, 11 June 2017 (UTC)
  • Looks like easy stuff to me:
    1. If it's not actually a title of a work or abbreviation of one, just a conventional name, appellation, description, quote of first line, on-the-fly translation, etc., used as a surrogate name (sometimes in absence of there even being a real one), or something like a series or a library collection, it does not get stylized, either in italics or quotation marks. The guidelines already cover this in more general terms: We specify what gets italics, what gets quotation marks, and if it's not on the list, it doesn't get either. We even already mention some of these things specifically as not stylized, but we need not list every conceivable non-stylized thing, since that would be a never-ending list, and applying any stylization to content is the exception not the rule. Much of the point of MoS being a concise guideline with examples and skipping most of the obvious, rather than a massive, "cover everything anyone may ever wonder about" work like The Chicago Manual of Style or New Hart's Rules, is to extrapolate logically from what is specified, with the common reader in mind. To respond to the specific examples: neither "Hoboken catalogue" or "Deutsch catalogue" appear to be titles of works (they'd be capitalized if they were, for one thing), but are names of categorization systems; these do not take stylization.
    2. A set, series, group, or franchise of works isn't a work; thus, no stylization. The guidelines already cover this under franchises and sets/series of books.
    3. A collected edition that is published as a book is a book and thus italicized (just as a greatest hits album is an album, and a graphic novel collecting 20 issues of a comic is a book, and so is a book of an artist's paintings all of which get italics themselves as stand-alone works of visual art, etc., etc.) Don't overthink it; there is no "only one thing in the chain of works can be italicized" rule. If I write a novel, a second novel, a short story, and a poem, and they're all eventually published in a collected-works volume, that volume's and the two novels' titles get italics, the shorter works get quotation marks. There is nothing actually complicated about this.
    4. Abbreviations of italicized titles are also italicized: "J. R. R. Tolkien's LotR takes longer to read than it does to watch all the Star Trek movies, from ST:TMP onward." "A citation to Enc. Brit. isn't a very good one here, because that's a tertiary source." Etc. The guidelines cover this already, too. The fact that the BVW is "a catalogue" is irrelevant. The next volume on your shelf may be a cook book, and the one after that a romance novel. They all get italics. In the proposal below, I address the library collection as "a catalogue" (short version: not italicized, since not a book or other comparable published work). Don't get confused by words having multiple meanings. Even "book" has multiple meanings. If I divide my novel into three big chapters called "Book 1", etc., these are not italicized as books, but given quotation marks as chapters, even if they have subchapters (= more quotation marks).
    5. "Baedeker" used as a common noun (to refer to any of their publications in general), as a genericized trademark (to refer casually to travel guides even more generally), and as the company name: these take no stylization. An exact title of one of those publications is italicized, and so would be Baedeker when used as an abbreviation of a specific one or ones ("I have two London travel guides on me: Frommer's from 2015, and a much older Baedeker" – here "Baedeker" is a stand-in for the full title, Baedeker London). It looks to me like "Baekeder's" is just wrong in many cases; the possessive does not appear to be used in the titles of them since a long time ago. Modern ones appear to be titled things like Baedeker London. Also, the article List of Baedeker Guides has incorrect style, applying italics to the series name Baedeker Guides (see point above about series/sets/franchises of publications).
    6. Anhang and Anh.: Use italics, as non-English (and really should be in a {{lang|de|...}} tag, as I've done here). Similarly, we italicize Latinisms and their abbreviations (other than a handful like "i.e." that have been fully assimilated as English). If this term and its abbreviation are conventionally used in English sources about such works, then it's okay to use them here, but the objection above that non-expert readers aren't going to know what Anhang and Anh. mean is a valid one. There are multiple approaches to resolving that, the most obvious being a footnote upon first occurrence explaining that it means "Annex", if it's used in main article text. Not necessary if it's just in a citation. Don't use the German term or its abbreviation if reliable sources in English also use "Annex"; if several do, that means using the German is an arbitrary style choice on their part, and en.WP is not arbitrary in such a case, but has WP:USEENGLISH.
 — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  20:34, 19 June 2017 (UTC)
  • Re. #1: so,
    • Hoboken catalogue
    • Deutsch catalogue
(neither italicised). Seems logical. That's all I retain from that answer, the rest of the wordiness seemed rather confusing than helpful. --Francis Schonken (talk) 11:37, 30 July 2017 (UTC)
Don't see a reason why Anh. would be italicised in any of these cases. That's not how it's done in relevant literature. Not ever. --Francis Schonken (talk) 10:12, 30 July 2017 (UTC)

Proposed addition to Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Titles#Series titles

Similarly when referring to a particular edition of a (set of) work(s), rather than to the creative work(s) contained in it:

--Francis Schonken (talk) 10:12, 7 June 2017 (UTC)

  • Oppose. "NBArev" is an abbreviation of something, but it is not one of Johann Sebastian Bach: New Edition of the Complete Works – Revised Edition. If this were conventionally abbreviated NECWRE, short for the title, then it would get italicized as an abbreviation of an italicized title, which the guideline already covers. And the "Revised Edition" part normally doesn't go in italics; edition information goes after the title, without stylization (Johann Sebastian Bach: New Edition of the Complete Works, Revised Edition) except when the edition information/name appears with the title on the cover or the title page, which I assume is the case here. "Short title" is just another way of saying "abbreviation", so it's still italicized for an work the full title of which gets that style: "I really liked Empire more than the original Star Wars"). This isn't just some Wikipedia convention, but found in all major English-language style guides. I do agree that conventional names that are not titles or abbreviations thereof, are not italicized, and same with WP editors' own translations; guidelines already cover these cases and more.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  20:34, 19 June 2017 (UTC)
    • For clarity: NBArev is the abbreviation of Neue Bach-Ausgabe – Revidierte Edition, the full title of which is Johann Sebastian Bach: Neue Ausgabe sämtlicher Werke – Revidierte Edition. Now this edition is bilingual (German/English), as opposed to the NBA predecessor which was exclusively in German. So the full title "as published" & "as appearing in the printed volumes" of the series is Johann Sebastian Bach: New Edition of the Complete Works – Revised Edition for an English-language readership (as, for example, the readership of en.Wikipedia). The short title of the series reads in English: New Bach Edition – Revised, which (also for an English readership) can be rendered by the NBArev abbreviation (NBErev has no traction whatsoever afaik). Anyhow, current project space guidance is completely inadequate for the en.Wikipedia editor trying to figure out which of these full titles / short titles / abbreviations should be italicised and which ones should not:
      1. NBArev or NBArev?
      2. Neue Bach-Ausgabe – Revidierte Edition or Neue Bach-Ausgabe – Revidierte Edition
      3. Johann Sebastian Bach: Neue Ausgabe sämtlicher Werke – Revidierte Edition or Johann Sebastian Bach: Neue Ausgabe sämtlicher Werke – Revidierte Edition?
      4. NBA or NBA?
      5. Johann Sebastian Bach: New Edition of the Complete Works – Revised Edition or Johann Sebastian Bach: New Edition of the Complete Works – Revised Edition?
      6. New Bach Edition – Revised or New Bach Edition – Revised
    Re. "the "Revised Edition" part normally doesn't go in italics..." – and then NBArev for sure... Nah, unhelpful. --Francis Schonken (talk) 12:46, 30 July 2017 (UTC)

Proposed change for Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Abbreviations#Latin abbreviations

I'd replace the section by the following:

==Italicisation==

===Latin===

In normal usage, abbreviations of Latin words and phrases should be italicised, except AD, c., e.g., etc. and i.e., which have become ordinary parts of the English language. The expansions of Latin abbreviations should still be italicised, as with most foreign words and phrases (Anno Domini, circa, exempli gratia, et cetera, id est). These are not normally used in article prose.

Do not use &c. in the place of etc.

===Catalogues===

Catalogues may be separately published lists (e.g. Fritz Hennenberg. Das Kantatenschaffen von Gottfried Heinrich Stölzel. Leipzig, 1976) or more generally the content of a collection (e.g. the catalogue of the Music Division of the Library of Congress). In either case, an abbreviation referring to the catalogue is not italicized (e.g. HennenbergS or H. for the first example, and US-Wc for the second). This also applies when the abbreviated reference to the catalogue is an initialism derived from an actual book title, e.g. BWV not BWV when referring to the Bach-Werke-Verzeichnis

Consequently, change the lead sentence of Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Text formatting#Names and titles to: "Italics should be used for the following types of names and titles, and abbreviations thereof (apart from the exceptions mentioned at Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Abbreviations#Italicisation):" --Francis Schonken (talk) 09:37, 8 June 2017 (UTC)

  • I doubt you'll get any buy-in on this without specifying exactly what the changes are and what the rationale for each is, especially to the "Latin" section. I'm skeptical many will open the original in another window and compare it with your proposed wording side-by-side.

    I have to oppose the proposed "Catalogues" material, on the merits. The guideline already covers this: If it's an abbreviation of an italicized title, it gets italicized. This is addressed above and at the related Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Abbreviations#italicization of acronyms/initialisms for otherwise italicized titles discussion, by more than one respondent. You're proposing to erase one form of general consistency to impose another very narrow sort that virtually no one cares about. The one would you would undo affects orders of magnitude more articles, so it would be a net loss in consistency. It can be frustrating when lots of consistency in one direction causes minor, orthogonal inconsistency elsewhere, and someone subjectively really wants the narrow case to be consistent, but that's life. The fact is that a book and a library's collection are radically different things; one takes italics, one does not. It's pure accident that in a certain context both are called "catalogues" by some people.

    Minor quibbles: We do not borrow odd conventions of one style of bibliographic citation (a form of structured data presentation) and apply them to normal English sentences; the "." after Hennenberg's name, and again between his work's title and the location/date information, is ungrammatical in prose; a comma is called for in both cases. Also, for a lengthy construction, "e.g." should be followed by a comma. Some insist on always using one after "e.g." or "i.e.", but it can usually be dropped if what follows is only one or two words. It shouldn't be dropped before a long clause, or material containing its own clause-separating punctuation.
     — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  20:34, 19 June 2017 (UTC)

  • Whatever SMC says is güt. (Summoned by bot) d.g. L3X1 (distænt write) )evidence( 15:11, 21 June 2017 (UTC)
    • Re. "Whatever SMC says is güt" (BTW, shouldn't that be güt, italicised and with a {{lang|de|...}} wrapped around it?) – sorry to say, but disagree. Wouldn't say that "... one would you would undo ..." is said very güt. I see platitudes, rambling, idiosyncrasies, more platitudes ("The guideline already covers this" being one of the "flattest" of these platitudes), more rambling, etc. Nothing helpful. TL;DR alas doesn't apply any more, but that's what I'd recommend to people trying to parse SMC's comments in this section. Only illustrates how bad an idea selective canvassing is in most cases. --Francis Schonken (talk) 14:51, 30 July 2017 (UTC)
The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Mathematics variables section is wrong and needs updating

It's actually been wrong the entire time. It is supposing that plain typographic italics should be used for maths variables and that {{var}} a.k.a. <var> markup is reserved for programming variables, but this is completely incorrect and has been the entire time WP has existed.

  • "The <var> element represents a variable. This could be an actual variable in a mathematical expression or programming context, an identifier representing a constant, a symbol identifying a physical quantity, a function parameter, or just be a term used as a placeholder in prose." HTML 5.1, 2nd ed., W3C, 3 October 2017 (the new version, written by a consortium of 100+ organizations)
  • "The var element represents a variable. This could be an actual variable in a mathematical expression or programming context, an identifier representing a constant, a symbol identifying a physical quantity, a function parameter, or just be a term used as a placeholder in prose." HTML5: A vocabulary and associated APIs for HTML and XHTML, W3C, 28 October 2014 (the currently broadly deployed version of same)
  • "The var element represents a variable. This could be an actual variable in a mathematical expression or programming context, an identifier representing a constant, a symbol identifying a physical quantity, a function parameter, or just be a term used as a placeholder in prose." HTML Living Standard, WHATWG, 6 October 2017 (the version written by a consortium consisting of Mozilla, Apple, and Opera – for once in total agreement with W3C)
  • "VAR: Indicates an instance of a variable or program argument." [ HTML 4.01 Specification, W3C 24 December 1999 (the formerly broadly deployed version); note that it does not say "an instance of a program variable or argument".

So, the only thing that's changed since HTML4 in the 1990s is explicit recognition of use for non-maths, non-code placeholders in running prose.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ<  00:37, 7 October 2017 (UTC)

So what difference does this actually make in the rendered page? If the answer is "not much", if this is just HTML arcanery, I'll bow out and let you figure it out.
The reason that I ask is that there's this {{math}} template that I personally really dislike (see how ugly the results are at e (mathematical constant)). My main complaint is that it forces everything into serif, which I find really jarring in running sans-serif text. (I would withdraw this objection if we could just display math articles entirely in serif, which really would be better for math articles, but of course that isn't going to happen.) --Trovatore (talk) 05:46, 30 October 2017 (UTC)
Serif is less ambiguous because sans-serif fonts often don't distinguish between uppercase I (the first-person pronoun), lowercase L, the digit 1, and a vertical bar |, all of which can appear near each other in mathematics formatting. More to the point, serif is the choice of the <math> formatting, which is unavoidable for complex expressions. If we want to match its formatting for simple expressions using html markup instead of <math>, the only choice is {{math}} (with an italic variable name inside) or {{mvar}} (which combines {{math}} with the italic markup). Straight italics are wrong, because they produce a visual appearance far from the appearance of the same variables inside <math>, and {{var}} is wrong for exactly the same reason. Compare <math>x</math>: ; {{mvar|x}}: x; {{math|''x''}}: x; ''x'': x; {{var|x}}: x. The <math> and {{mvar}} options produce a curly x (although still different enough to me that I prefer using <math> everywhere to mixing the two); the italic and var options produce a straight one (at least in my rendering preferences). There's no point arguing that variables should be sans-serif to match the body text, when <math> is both unavoidable for formatting complex formulas and unchangeably serif. —David Eppstein (talk) 06:20, 30 October 2017 (UTC)
Well, but it was decided long ago that <math> should not appear in running text. I agree that serif is less ambiguous; I would actually prefer to use it for Wikipedia as a whole, but as I say that's not going to happen.
Given that, probably it's best just not to do math in running text, to the extent it can reasonably be avoided. When it can't, though, I would prefer to use sans (and in cases of ambiguity, figure something out case-by-case to avoid it). The results of {{math}} are just too jarring.
Note that it's far from unprecedented to use sans for math — the LaTeX Beamer class does it by default, and this has not prevented it from being the de-facto standard for slide preparation in academic math. --Trovatore (talk) 06:27, 30 October 2017 (UTC)
Re "it was decided" — enough things have changed since then (in particular, <math> is now merely not-very-good as opposed to the horribly mis-sized and pixelated atrocity that it used to be), so I don't think that decision is so relevant any more. And in fact, revisiting old formatting decisions is exactly what we're doing here, so saying that we decided it and shouldn't revisit that decision is not very helpful. As for beamer: sure, but it uses the same sans-serif fonts throughout, so there's no problem with body text variables looking nothing like the same variables in display formulas. —David Eppstein (talk) 06:45, 30 October 2017 (UTC)
In my view, a difference between the appearance of variables in running text versus how they appear in displayed formulas is acceptable, or at least more acceptable than the clash of typefaces within running text itself. --Trovatore (talk) 06:49, 30 October 2017 (UTC)
(edit conflict) I'm having trouble following some of that, Trovatore. E.g., "My main complaint is that it forces everything into serif" + "if [only] we could just display math articles entirely in serif". If you mean literally make every single character on the entire page serif, there's no way people would agree with that (we don't use radically different style on a topical basis), and there'd be no way to ensure it anyway (a lot of people are already using user CSS to override the serif headings that were imposed in some skins a couple of years ago).

Anyway, as for {{Math}}, that could probably be hacked to have a parameter to stop serifizing (presumably by replacing the class=texhtml part). Might be worth asking on the talk page if there's a reason for serif-by-default imposition. I would guess that it was done either as a vague "I like math this way" idea, or specifically to get around the problem of "I" and "l" and sometimes "1" looking very similar in some sans-serif fonts. We have {{varserif}} for that, anyway.

As for the <var>...</var> and {{var}} markup (which work inside {{Math}} and outside of it, though the {{Mvar}} template exists for use alongside {{Math}} (i.e., to format a variable in isolation in a way that matches its appearance inside a {{Math}} block. Using {{Var}} and <var>...</var> work inside {{Math}}, since the just inherit their context's style, other than the italics.

The rendered visual difference would be minor if any; the var element does not impose a serif or sans-serif font (though {{Mvar}} does, among other things). The semantic but non-visual output, however, is a non-trivial difference, just as it is with {{em}} or <em>...</em> versus <i>...</i> or ''...''

What people actually bother to write – for almost any case in which var markup is appropriate – is either regular italics or no markup at all, because the average editor doesn't know or care about such technicalities. The var stuff (like em markup, and using <br /> not mangled versions like <BR>, or using <span style="...">...</span> or <div style="...">...</div> instead of sloppy <font ...>...</font> or <center>...</center>) is primarily a WP:GNOME matter, generating proper, modern Semantic HTML. Doing so is a boon for reuse, for internal code maintenance, and for screen readers (in theory, anyway; as I understand it, many vision-impaired users do not bother to do anything custom with a lot of semantic markup yet, though CSS-based tools will continue to improve over time).

My reason for bringing up this whole thread is that we're saying to prefer var markup, per the HTML specs, then – for no apparent reason – saying to make an exception for math, when that has never been a valid exception. Those of us who do semantic-markup gnoming have certainly not been following any "no var markup for math" pseudo-rule, so there is no point to having this block of nit-picky inconsistency in the guideline. It's not just wrong-headed, it's a classic example of topical WP:CREEP that doesn't even match what people are doing. That includes conscientious maths editors, who created {{Mvar}} – they obviously want to use var markup, and it's just that MOS:ITALICS hasn't kept up with them. Someone put this "no var for math" nonsense in MOS:ITALICS, long ago, for idiosyncratic reasons. I'd bet it was "I use LaTex a lot, and it doesn't have var markup, ergo force everyone to use LaTex style so I don't have to do anything different"; not a good reason, since LaTex and HTML have different semantics, and no one actually has to follow MoS when writing, they just shouldn't interfere with people bring text into compliance with MoS later.

Haven't really looked into <math>...</math> (embedded LaTex) markup in any detail; I don't know if it supports any variable-specific markup at all, or just italics. Finding out will take some research; I don't use LaTex myself much, and doing searches on things like "variables in LaTex" brings up page after page about variables within not displayed by LaTex (i.e., variables used in LaTex commands, as macros etc, not variables in the math content being marked up).
 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ<  06:56, 30 October 2017 (UTC)

You can certainly change fonts within LaTeX markup. For instance, to achieve sans-serif, you can use \mathsf: <math>\mathsf{x}</math> produces . The thing you have to realize, though, is that in mathematical notation changing the font of something also usually changes its meaning. One can have mathematical formulas with variables that are each the same letter but in a different font, and what that means is that they are actually different variables from each other, and the font usually tells you something about what type of object the variable stands for. So mixing serif and sans-serif for a single variable is a really bad idea, because to a trained mathematician it looks like you are talking about two variables but you only defined one of them and now you're using a different one and what does that even mean? —David Eppstein (talk) 07:22, 30 October 2017 (UTC)
Well, now, I think you're going a little overboard on the font/semantics connection here. Sure, there are Fraktur letters that mean different things from their roman or italic equivalents. But I do not ever recall serif-vs-sans being used distinctively in any serious mathematical work. --Trovatore (talk) 08:07, 30 October 2017 (UTC)
I've frequently seen sans used for computational complexity classes e.g. . I wouldn't be surprised if some of the works doing that also use as a variable for a set, path, or similar large object. —David Eppstein (talk) 15:52, 30 October 2017 (UTC)
Well, I'll concede the possibility that it might happen somewhere, sometime. It is certainly not common. I don't think very many readers would have much trouble matching up e in running text with in a displayed formula, and it just looks so much better in running sans text. --Trovatore (talk) 17:51, 30 October 2017 (UTC)
Regardless, it's good that var markup is font-agnostic, including inside {{Math}}. When it comes to LaTex, what I'd been getting at, however, was that I don't know if it has any dedicated markup for variables as a class; I knew already that it had non-semantically defined ways to change font display (e.g. imposing/removing italics, or serif, or both).  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ<  07:46, 30 October 2017 (UTC)
I am pleased to see a discussion taking place on how to format mathematical expressions. My main comments are
* All variables should be in italic.
* All mathematical constants (including e, i and pi) should be roman (upright).
* Standard operators (eg sin, cos, ln, and the differential operator d) should be roman (upright).
If we can agree on these simple rules, from the International System of Quantities, we will have achieved something IMO. Dondervogel 2 (talk) 13:49, 30 October 2017 (UTC)
No way you're going to get agreement on upright constants. If the ISO recommends that, it only detracts from their credibility by making clear that they haven't taken seriously the concerns of actual mathematicians. —David Eppstein (talk) 15:54, 30 October 2017 (UTC)
On this one I agree with David. ISO messed up big time on this one. Not that there was ever any need for an ISO recommendation on math styling; they should have just stayed out of it period. --Trovatore (talk) 17:54, 30 October 2017 (UTC)
Two questions
  1. I always assumed that the purpose of using an upright e for the mathematical constant was to distinguish it from a variable e. How do mathematician's make this distinction?
  2. Leaving mathematical constants aside, can we agree on the other two points (all variables in italics and standard operators upright)?
Dondervogel 2 (talk) 18:02, 30 October 2017 (UTC)
There is no important distinction to be made between variables and constants.* They are both letters that stand for values. In the form you mean it, a constant is a value that has become commonplace in the mathematical literature while a variable is a value that's defined on a one-time basis in an individual document, but that's it. In particular, mathematics variables are not the same as programming variables: they generally have a single value (just like a constant) rather than taking different values at different times. Distinctions between types of values (scalar/vector/matrix or element/set/family of sets) are generally much more important, so that's what variations in formatting should be used for. The answer to "how do you tell Euler's constant e from some other usage of e" is: don't use both meanings in a single document, and if it's not otherwise clear say what you mean.
* There is an important distinction between variables of known value, variables of unknown value (to be solved for), and variables of indeterminate value (arbitrary elements of a given set), but it's not the same distinction as the one between Euler's constant and locally-defined values that we're talking about here. Also, it's fluid, so you can't strictly assign each letter to one class or another. For instance if you're solving two equations in two unknowns by Gaussian elimination, you start with two unknown-value variables, but sometime in the middle one of the values becomes known and should be treated as such in computing the value of the other variable.
As for Stanton's question about whether LaTeX notation includes semantic markup: not really. An example from a much longer rant I wrote a while back: "xRy" could be (1) multiplication of three real numbers, (2) multiplication of a row vector, matrix, and column vector, (3) a string of terminals (lower case) and nonterminals (upper case) in a derivation from a context free grammar, (4) applying the prefix operator R to the argument y, and then another prefix operator x to the result, (5) a binary relation R on two elements x and y, (6) something else I haven't thought of. It's important that mathematical notation be easy to type and flexible enough to cover new circumstances beyond the imagination of the creator of the formatting system, and the designers of LaTeX didn't consider the cumbersomness of semantic markup worthwhile. In practice, mathematical documents will often define LaTeX macros for semantic constructs that need repeated formatting in a certain way, but that's not possible here, because there's no way to have macro definitions in our articles and have them be understood by our math formula rendering pipeline. —David Eppstein (talk) 18:17, 30 October 2017 (UTC)

To Dondervogel's second question: No. The differential d should be in italics. That is the tradition in mathematics, and I see no warrant to futz with it on the grounds of what some silly standards body thinks would tidy things up. --Trovatore (talk) 18:45, 30 October 2017 (UTC)
I think we can agree on the operators sin, cos, exp, etc being upright, but it's because that's how one formats multi-letter operators in general, and has nothing to do with how standard they are. (This one is something LaTeX has semantic markup for: \operatorname.) —David Eppstein (talk) 19:23, 30 October 2017 (UTC)
Yes, without needing to specify the rationale, I agree, those are traditionally roman. However I don't see any need for guidance on those, because in practice no one puts them in italics, except maybe just out of laziness inside <math>, and in that case they are unlikely to object when someone cleans it up. --Trovatore (talk) 19:31, 30 October 2017 (UTC)

I am not willing to read completely this entire discussion, but I want emphasize some points that seem to not appear in this discussion.

  • The opening post asserts implicitly that the only right way for writing mathematics is the way that fulfill some meta-logic (of HTML or other). I do not agree with this view: correct meta-rules have to be preferred only when they allow the rendering that is desired by the writer.
  • The choice between serif and sanserif for math variables and constants is not only done for aesthetic reasons, and the rules of readability for mathematics are not identical with the rules of readability for pure prose: when the same variable is rendered differently in different places of the same paragraph, it requires some effort for the reader to understand that the two renderings denote the same thing. This is not a difficulty for an expert, but this may be confusing for the layman (math is difficult enough by itself, no need to increase the difficulty without good reasons). Should we explain in every math article that ag (produced with {{var}}) or ag (simple italic) is the same as ag ({{math}}), ag ({{mvar}}) and (<math>)?
  • Considering that one cannot avoid <math> for some formulas, one can see from the preceding example, that the only way to have a unique shape for all variables is to use only <math>. Nevertheless, as <math> produces a bad alignment and a smaller font, it is a good compromise to use of {{mvar}} or {{math}} for inline formulas. However, for formulas containing exponents or indices, the bad alignment and the smaller font of <math> becomes an advantage (also it is easier to write in this case).

My conclusion: {{math}} and {{mvar}} should be preferred to {{var}} and simple italics for simple inline formulas (including isolated variables), and <math> should be preferred in the other cases.

IMO, the section on math variables should be updated in this way. By the way it should be noted that this section is misleading by using {{xt}}, which produces a serif font. I'll fix this. D.Lazard (talk) 09:18, 1 November 2017 (UTC) D.Lazard (talk) 09:18, 1 November 2017 (UTC)

I'm happier with the format of the maths being different from text, I don't think of English and maths or chemistry or anything like that as being the same language and prefer to be able to spot the maths in the text and pick it out easily.
By the way as well one can also use {{tmath}} for variables instead of {{mvar}} and it'll generate a proper <math>...</math> round the name and format the numbers properly as in {{tmath|x2}} gives ⁠⁠. It can't be used easily in general instead of the math tag as it doesn't handle = nicely but it can do the simple things one wants inline. I would have hesitated to say this before because <math> was such a performance killer but things seem much better now. Dmcq (talk) 11:14, 1 November 2017 (UTC)
"The opening post asserts implicitly that the only right way for writing mathematics is the way that fulfill some meta-logic" – I implied no such thing at all. I have little care whether people prefer <math>...</math> (LaTex) markup, or plain-or-templated) wikitext (i.e. HTML) markup. If they are using HTML, then the MoS's current wording saying to use bare italics instead of the semantic <var>...</var> (wiki template: {{var}}) markup is provably incorrect, based on a misreading of (or not actually reading at all) the HTML specs.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ<  17:32, 1 November 2017 (UTC)

Phrasing tweak in § Article title terms

Regarding § Boldface#Article title terms, "a term that redirects to", has been changed to, "a term that's redirected to", as 'redirection' is something which happens to an instance of a term, not an inherent quaity of the term itself.
Thanks for your time and attention, --A Fellow Editor (talk) 17:41, 25 November 2017 (UTC)

Need clarification on italicizing foreign words vis-a-vis foreign song titles (MOS:ETY)

MOS:ETY says to italicize foreign words. However, what about song titles that are in a foreign language? Normally, they go in quotation marks for English song titles, but does that go for foreign song titles too? Do you italicize foreign songs and put them in quotation marks too? – Illegitimate Barrister (talk • contribs), 20:10, 27 October 2017 (UTC)

Just quotation marks. The italicize-foreign-words thing exempts proper names, and song titles are proper names.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ<  21:20, 27 October 2017 (UTC)
Danke. – Illegitimate Barrister (talk • contribs), 01:17, 28 October 2017 (UTC)
Which is why the lang-x templates family should not force italics. Terms like "Bayerische Staatsoper" or "Bist du bei mir" don't need them. If needed (Im Westen nichts Neues, amuse-bouche, festina lente), italics can be applied in the usual manner. This was recently discussed at Template talk:Lang-de#Restoring italics and many times before elsewhere, mostly resulting in forced italics by those templates. -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 02:56, 28 October 2017 (UTC)
The fix for that is to add a |italic=no parameter. Ideally this would all be done in a meta-template; it really doesn't make much sense that every Template:Lang-xx is a completely separate thing with individually coded parameters.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ<  04:04, 28 October 2017 (UTC)
Pending the outcome of the proposed template upgrade (see subtopic below), this will work:
Code: {{langx|es|<nowiki />''casa''<nowiki />}}
Output: [casa] Error: {{Langx}}: text has italic markup (help)
A blecherous kludge, but it works. How it works: by turning off the italics started by the template, then giving the non-English term, then turning italics on again after it, which the template immediately turns back off. Uses the <nowiki /> trick to prevent the template's '' and the input's '' from being concatenated into '''' which parses as boldface plus a stray '.
A less MediaWiki-ish and more HTML/CSS-ish variant of this approach: {{lang-es|1=<span style="font-style:normal">casa</span>}} – Spanish: casa.
 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ<  07:34, 30 October 2017 (UTC)
Someone pointed out this also works: {{lang-es|{{noitalic|casa}}}} – Spanish: casa.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ<  16:10, 31 October 2017 (UTC)
Warning: All bets may be off about the above hacks, because the {{lang}} code is being overhauled and re-implemented in WP:Lua.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ<  13:26, 12 December 2017 (UTC)

Overhauling the lang-xx templates for more selective italics behavior

FYI
 – Pointer to relevant discussion elsewhere.

Please see: Template talk:Lang#Parameter to selectively disable auto-italics in the Lang-xx templates
 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ<  07:18, 30 October 2017 (UTC)

Use of boldface for redirected terms / terms being defined

At the Heisenbug article, an editor and I have a small disagreement. There are several terms that are redirected to that article: bohrbug, mandelbug, hindenbug and schrödinbug. The MOS seems to state that, even though they're not in the lede sentence, that because they are redirects they can (or even should) be bold. There is wording in the MOS:BOLD section that seems to imply that they can be bold in both the lede section and when they are first encountered in the prose. What is the case? Should they be bold at all? Should they be bold when they are encountered in the prose. Should they be bold in both locations? Should they be bold everywhere? Walter Görlitz (talk) 15:30, 6 October 2017 (UTC)

Bold at first occurrence in the prose whether in the lead or not. Not boldfaced after that. MOS:BOLD isn't unclear about this at all: "The most common use of boldface is to highlight the first occurrence of the title word/phrase of the article (and often its synonyms) in the lead section, as well as terms that are redirected to the article or its sub-sections." There's no relationship between "that are redirected" and "in the lead section". I suppose this could be clarified by splitting this into two sentences. I'll try that in next edit.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ<  00:07, 7 October 2017 (UTC)
Done. Also provided a clear example of when it's not helpful (based on a previous editwar.)  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ<  00:13, 7 October 2017 (UTC)
I just saw. Excellent. This agrees with my understanding. Does this mean I'm becoming a wikilawyer? Walter Görlitz (talk) 00:17, 7 October 2017 (UTC)
I prefer to think of it is being a wiki-paralegal. We do the real work, but don't grandstand hyperbolically in court and try to win at all costs even if we're doing an injustice. >;-)  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ<  00:39, 7 October 2017 (UTC)
Amending the discussion heading to something more meaningful - hope you don't mind.
@SMcCandlish: what is your reference for the "real" rules, as they may differ from what is actually said here? Who makes these rules, anyway?
Furthermore:
  • Neither version addresses the basic reason for which the terms had been boldfaced in this instance: they are terms being defined. This seems to be a common convention, not merely on Wikipedia. Indeed, I had always assumed this common convention was the underlying reason behind boldfacing the subject of the article in the first sentence of the text of most articles.
  • One of the points refers to following the "principle of least astonishment" for redirect targets. By boldfacing the terms we would be following this principle, just the same as we would be if all the terms we were applying it to were at the start of the section. Indeed, by insisting that the terms must not be in bold, you guys are going against this principle. Indeed I'm inclined to say that, because they aren't all in one place at the start of the section, it is more important to make them stand out.
  • Note also the message at the top of this and other MoS pages: "It is a generally accepted standard that editors should attempt to follow, though it is best treated with common sense, and occasional exceptions may apply."
  • This is only an issue because the terms are briefly mentioned in the lead as well as here. Why should such a small detail of the content of the lead dictate the formatting elsewhere in the article?
  • If these terms being defined shouldn't be boldfaced, how should they be formatted? Previously they were in italics; now they have no formatting applied to them at all. This doesn't seem right to me.
— Smjg (talk) 17:41, 8 October 2017 (UTC)
WP's rules are their own reference; no external authority is telling WP how to write its own internal guidelines and policies. Whatever editors care to work on them are those who make them. Because WP:Writing policy is hard, and we don't like WP:Instruction creep, and WP has been around 16+ years, we tend not to get many new rules these days. Most edits to these pages are to tie off loopholes, clarify wording that some editors find confusing or misinterpret, to update wording that no longer reflects actual consensus practice, and to reduce redundant (and thus PoV-forkable) instructions to centralize the advice on something in one place and cross-reference it from other pages where the matter comes up. At MoS pages, we also sometimes update line-items to better reflect off-WP practice that has shifted, as reflected in newer editions of mainstream style guides (doesn't come up often, since formal written English changes slowly).
  • WP is not a dictionary and isn't really defining anything. Sources define them. The purpose of bolding synonyms/subtopics in WP articles is letting readers know they really are at the right page. Different works take a different approach to laying out what they're defining or covering. Some use bold, some use italics, some use a larger or otherwise distinct font, some numbered sections, etc., etc. It's a house style matter. Some things, like field guides, have a tendency to stylize, at every occurrence, the names of things they have articles/entries on; WP doesn't do this, since blue links serve that function – where actually helpful – and we have articles on just about everything, so default presumption is "yes, we have an article on this".
  • I'm not sure what point you're trying to make. We're already boldfacing synonyms, and subtopics that redirect there, at first occurrence. Doing it over and over and over again will not do anything but annoy people, and has nothing to do with principle of least astonishment. We're also already bolding redirect terms and such whether they first appear in the lead or out of it, so you're arguing for what we already do. However, if it's got its own entire section there's generally no need to boldface it on first occurrence in that section since the section's subheading already serves that purpose; some people do it, some don't, it generally doesn't cause disputes or reader confusion, so we don't need a rule about it.
  • And? This is true of all of our guidelines (and, to a lesser extent policies, per WP:IAR).
  • See bullet one. The reader already knows they're at the right article. If they got there by redirect to a section about the term in question, they also already know they're at the right page.
  • As plain text, unless they're being treated in a words-as-words manner, e.g. "In archaeology, the term provenience is used with a meaning distinct from that of the art-history term provenance ..." The usual style is italics, unless the material is already italics-heavy, in which case use quotation marks. If it's already boldfaced, there's no need to use italics or quotation marks, though some do, for parallel constructions, when two terms are being compared (as in the archaeology example). Again it doesn't cause disputes or reader confusion, so we don't need a rule about it.
The article Provenance is probably a good example. The sometimes-synonymous term provenience is bolded in the lead, since it redirects there. In the "Archaeology, anthropology, and paleontology" subsection, provenience is italicized in a words-as-words construction, but not boldfaced again. The related term find spot is boldfaced because it has not appeared in the article before, and it redirects there.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ<  00:14, 9 October 2017 (UTC)

May names of living persons when targeted by redirect pages be boldfaced outside of WP:BLP pages?

[note: Adding here as policy-and-guidelines cited and discussed above may also be relevant in this.]

Does WP:BLP in some manner prohibit the boldfacing of names of living persons targeted by redirect pages in non-BLP articles? Two editors have asserted such in a thread at: Talk:The Evergreen State College#Boldfacing of redirect target (permalink). However, as yet, no one has cited any specific passage of WP:BLP which might be directly applicable to superseding the cited recommendations of WP:MOS in this. ––A Fellow Editor– 14:28, 12 December 2017 (UTC)

More of a WP:COMMONSENSE and WP:UNDUE matter. Softlavender is correct, in that thread, that it gives undue emphasis to a particular party in the material. It really doesn't make any sense that that name redirects there; if the person is notable then an article should be created. If not, then the redir should not exist. If this redir were taken to WP:RFD it would be deleted. There are often cases where a particular person who's not independently notable is a redir to an article (e.g. on a band, or on the company they started, or the book they wrote, or whatever) when the topic is more notable than the person. Bolding can make sense in such a case if there's a 1:1 correlation between the person and the subject (e.g. author:book, founder:company), or when all the relevant persons redirect there (guitarist, singer, bassist, drummer : band), or when the person has a section at the article (5th Duke of Fooville : List of Dukes of Fooville). But it's not good to bold someone's name in the middle of a paragraph with other people in it when the topic of the target article is not intimately connected to that particular individual and the section isn't all about him/her either.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ<  15:30, 12 December 2017 (UTC)

Spacecraft names (once more)

I woulk like to raise, once again, the question of the naming of spacecraft to suggest that the passage on italicizing the names of spacecraft be clarified. A recent discussion at Talk:Gaia (Spacecraft) concerned whether the name of that spacecraft (and other unmanned spacecraft) should be italicized.

  • If we decide to reflect current Wikipedia practice, actual usage in Wikipedia has Hipparcos and Apollo 13 in roman type, while Spirit (rover); Magellan (spacecraft); Voyager 1 and Cassini-Huygens are all italicized.
  • Alternatively, it could reflect the practice of the sponsoring organizations which tend to avoid Italics (ESA does not use italics for Hipparcos and Gaia; NASA does not use itallics for Magellan and Voyager 1).
  • We might look at other authoritative sources on this issue.
  • The Chicago Manual of Style (14th ed.) has "Names of specific ships,… spacecraft, and artificial satellites are italicized.… Sputnik II, Mariner 4,… Pioneer 11, Voyager 2, Uhuru, IUE.… Designations of class or make,… and names of space programs are capitalized but not italicized,…Project Apollo."

Comment is welcome.--SteveMcCluskey (talk) 15:13, 11 December 2017 (UTC)

To give this discussion more focus, I suggest the following specific edit:
  • Spacecraft and satellites (including fictional): the Space Shuttle Challenger, Gaia satellite, USS Enterprise NCC-1701, Constitution-class starships (When they have different names, distinguish the name of the spacecraft from the name of the mission or series: the Eagle was the Apollo 11 lunar lander but Voyager 2).
--SteveMcCluskey (talk) 22:04, 11 December 2017 (UTC)
For clarity, the current wording is:
  • Spacecraft (often fictional): the Space Shuttle Challenger, USS Enterprise NCC-1701, Constitution-class starships (but distinguish the craft from the mission: The Eagle was the Apollo 11 lunar lander).
There is no reason for the dispute to have erupted, since the idea that a style variance would apply simply because a human isn't on board is weird nonsense. The USS Maine (ACR-1) sank over a century ago and has no one on board now, but isn't de-italicized. However, if adding an example of an unmanned craft will forestall pointless squabbles like this from arising in the future, them I'm all for it. However, "Spacecraft and satellites" is poor wording. Artificial satellites are spacecraft, and the Moon is a satellite. So just stick with the original "Spacecraft (often fictional)" wording; the simple act of adding an unmanned artificial satellite to the list of examples with get the point across without any further wording change in that part. The proposed clarifications to "distinguish the craft from the mission" seem reasonable, but the examples need to parse better, and we don't need all that verbiage. The combined rewrite I would support (also being clearer than just "distinguish"):
Spacecraft (including fictional): the Space Shuttle Challenger, Gaia satellite, USS Enterprise NCC-1701, Constitution-class starships. Do not italicize a mission, series, or class except where it coincides with a craft's name: the Eagle was the Apollo 11 lunar lander; Voyager 2 was the subject of the Voyager 2 mission.
 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ<   — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ<  13:24, 12 December 2017 (UTC)
That seems OK to me. --SteveMcCluskey (talk) 19:13, 12 December 2017 (UTC)
Support the concept and wording per request and SMcCandlish's well written reasoning. Randy Kryn (talk) 11:32, 13 December 2017 (UTC)

Avoidance of brow-beating emphasis

This is a followup to a discussion that started at User talk:Nbarth#Haplography?.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  13:30, 19 June 2018 (UTC)

I quite often come across blog/editorial/advocacy/marketing-style misuse of emphasis in constructions like "This is an intentional omission, and thus not haplography, which is unintentional omission of a duplicate." It's as if we think our readers are both stupid and half blind, and can't tell the difference between "intentional" and "unintentional". I've corrected hundreds if not thousands of cases of this over the years, and suspect we should probably address it directly at MOS:ITALICS, as a counterpoint to the extant material that reads:

  • "Emphasis may be used to draw attention to an important word or phrase within a sentence, when the point or thrust of the sentence may otherwise not be apparent to readers, or to stress a contrast: Gellner accepts that knowledge must be knowledge of something."

In short, not every contrast should be stressed, but too may editors are not getting it.

Indeed, just saying that gives us draft text to use. Proposed insertion:

  • "Not every contrast should be stressed; do not brow-beat readers with material like Haplography is unintentional omission of a duplicate letter."

Abuse of emphasis in this manner is already something that can be argued against on several grounds (WP:NPOV; WP:NOT in various parts including news, blog, advocacy; MOS:TONE; and others, depending on the context), but it's an argument that is tiresome to have to re-present again and again, especially when fans of this informal and condescending writing style will wikilawyer to retain it ("There's no rule that I can't do it, and I like it better with the italics"). So, let's just have a clear MoS line-item we can cite. PS: It will also be consistent with the related item at WP:Manual of Style/Abbreviations#Expanded forms, to not do things like "NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration)".
 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  05:41, 19 June 2018 (UTC)

More clarity may be needed re titles of works in foreign languages

This MOS page currently says:

Text in non-Latin scripts (such as Greek, Cyrillic or Chinese) should neither be italicized as non-English nor bolded, even where this is technically feasible; the difference of script suffices to distinguish it on the page. However, titles of major works that should be italicized are italicized in Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, and Hebrew scripts (but not in Chinese,[4] Japanese,[5] or Korean).[6]

This guidance provides help with Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, and Hebrew scripts and with Chinese, Japanese, and Korean writing. Conspicuous by their absence are Arabic, Devanagari, Thai, and other scripts aside from the seven that are mentioned. Is there MOS-level guidance somewhere else regarding these other scripts? For a practical application of this guidance, see {{Infobox book}}, which uses {{lang}}, which automatically italicizes certain languages and scripts. Some discussion is in progress at Template talk:Lang.

I did not find anything definitive in the archives of this talk page, but feel free to point at something that I missed. I did see a discussion from 2006. – Jonesey95 (talk) 23:21, 15 April 2018 (UTC)

The simple fix is to change this to say "titles of major works that should be italicized are italicized in scripts that support that feature (including Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, and Hebrew); do not apply italic markup to scripts that do not (including Chinese, Japanese, and Korean)". There are hundreds of scripts in the world, and we need not list them all, just provide the actual rationale and some common examples.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  08:14, 20 June 2018 (UTC)
 Done: [1], and copyedited a bit further [2].  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  08:19, 20 June 2018 (UTC)

The word "magazine" as part of a title

At professional boxing articles we constantly refer to the magazine, The Ring. In mainstream media and general speech, it is almost always referred to as "[The] Ring magazine". Formatting-wise, we at the project have silently gone back and forth between "The Ring magazine" and "The Ring magazine. Which of these is best practice on WP? Also, grammar-wise, I tend to go with something like this:

"... has held the Ring magazine title since..."

However, should it be this instead:

"... has held The Ring magazine title since..."?

I'm not sure why, but the latter looks clunky to me. Mac Dreamstate (talk) 21:03, 15 February 2018 (UTC)

@Mac Dreamstate: It reduces the "sea of blue" effect to use shorter link text when doing so won't be confusing, so I would lean toward "The Ring magazine". And it's normal English to drop a The from a title when it would be grammatically awkward ("Jones was a New York Times reporter for seven years before taking an editorial job the The Wall Street Journal"). It's similarly okay to lower-case a the when it's part of the grammatical structure of the surrounding sentence (i.e., would be there even if the work title didn't start with The). Not doing so can even be confusing and misleading. If three fans of The Lord of the Rings on a webboard were bashing the Shannara series as derivative, one could write of them that "According to the Lord of the Rings fans ...", where "the ... fans" means "the specific fans we just mentioned, who might be in the minority"), while "According to The Lord of the Rings fans ..." would imply a broad consensus among fans of The Lord of the Rings. Contrived example, but I've seen cases like this come up, and the one you illustrate seems to be one, because "the ... title" is the unit under discussion. It could have been "the WWE title" or something else. The "... has held The Ring magazine title" construction is confusing and seems to refer to the publication title of the magazine (i.e., it seems to imply trademark ownership), due to the ambiguity of the word "title".  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  08:34, 20 June 2018 (UTC)
A late thanks for this well-crafted response. It answered my query perfectly. Mac Dreamstate (talk) 01:15, 24 June 2018 (UTC)

Text formatting of references

Forgive me if this is in the wrong place. It's my understanding that references use minimal text formatting, namely that we italicize book titles and suchlike. In (what barely passes for) a discussion at Talk:P versus NP problem#MOS:BOLD it has been suggested that parts of some reference titles be bolded, even though the original authors do not use boldface. Could somebody please weigh in there before I pull all of my hair out? Cheers. nagualdesign 19:25, 23 June 2018 (UTC)

My feeling is that it is usually a mistake for authors to include mathematical formulas in their titles. But when they do, it is even more of a mistake to quote that title without properly formatting the formula as a formula. Look, both this comment and your rampage at P versus NP problem appear to be based on a misunderstanding of how mathematical notation works. The size, position with respect to the baseline, font style, and case of letters that are part of mathematical notation are all meaningful, as meaningful as which letter it is. When you change those formatting details based on aesthetics rather than based on the mathematics, you break the meaning of the formula. It is as if you were writing English but you thought that how a letter was oriented was just an aesthetic decision, so you mixed up all your d's, b's, and p's, and swapped your n's and u's for each other. It is wrong and you need to learn that it is wrong before you continue editing any more mathematical articles. —David Eppstein (talk) 19:51, 23 June 2018 (UTC)
"Rampage"? nagualdesign 20:06, 23 June 2018 (UTC)
Dubious edits, reinstatement of those edits even after you were informed of their dubiousness, and even-more-dubious and far-too-stubborn defense of those dubious edits? Rampage seemed more concise, but maybe there's a better word. Do you have a response to the substance of my message? —David Eppstein (talk) 20:10, 23 June 2018 (UTC)
Since you thought it necessary to question my competence, and took a simple (and obvious) typo as "a red flag", rather than responding to the substance of my original post, which you now characterize as a "rampage", I'm disinclined to give you a proper response. I will say though that I did not reinstate my edit (singular). I took on board the notion that complexity classes should indeed be bolded and, having received no reply regarding the use of bolding within references and that bit of pseudocode, I boldly (pun intended) removed the bolding therein. Re. "you mixed up all your d's, b's, and p's, and swapped your n's and u's for each other", I have no idea what you're talking about. nagualdesign 21:29, 23 June 2018 (UTC)
Yep, David Eppstein is correct. We format this stuff consistently for good reasons. This thread directly mirrors one we just had, at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style#MOS:CONFORM and citation titles, about properly italicizing book and film titles inside review article titles, e.g. |title=''Blade Runner 2049'': How Cutting-Edge Techniques Re-Created Character from Original. It's well within MOS:CONFORM, and we should probably add something about this at MOS:TITLES (it's more on-topic there than in the main MoS page or in MOS:TEXT).  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  20:47, 23 June 2018 (UTC)
@SMcCandlish: So it's okay to render "THE P VERSUS NP PROBLEM" as "The P versus NP Problem" (as a reference title), for example? Would it at least be acceptable to capitalize the V without being drawn into some sort of pissing contest? nagualdesign 21:29, 23 June 2018 (UTC)
If the boldfacing is conventional (in a way recognized by MoS, anyway – one should be alert for weird WP:SSF problems) for a mathematical class or a complexity class more specifically, then yes. We'd similarly apply italics and superscript in a chapter title like "Understanding E=mc2", and italics in "The summer range of Florida populations of Notophthalmus viridescens", and monospace and italics in something like "Proposed Revisions to the flex-basis Property Under CSS Snapshot 2017", and smallcaps in an article title like "Usability and the Unicode 'HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS' (U+2026)". There's nothing "mystically different" about text in a citation. It's just text, so do what we'd do if it weren't in a citation. (Within limits, of course; e.g., we don't convert American to Australian English in a citation's title to match the ENGVAR of the article.)

PS: Yes, "Versus", since WP follows the five-letter rule for prepositions in titles (capitalize them if 5 letters or longer, thus About but with). It seems to be conventional at this point to use title case for cited articles originally published title case and sentence case for those that were published that way, but MOS:CONFORM isn't going to be against normalizing to WP's own version of title case if title case is used. It's a KISS principle and principle of least astonishment thing: If you've been reading WP all day, you're used to our version of title rendering, so we shouldn't just veer into a different one to exactly mimic how some off-site journal handles capital letters under their own house style (the reason you're seeing "versus" is because many academic publishers have a house rule, following Chicago Manual of Style and Scientific Style and Format, to lower-case all prepositions, even the longest ones like "throughout"). This tweaking isn't a weird WP-ism; this kind of orthographical normalization is done by most publishers. If you published an article called "Why Not to Stick Chopsticks Into Your Nose", various citations to it would appear as "Why Not To ...", "Why not to ...", "... into Your Nose", etc., depending on who published the citation. An upshot of this is that any given citation you see in one article to one published in a different journal is fairly unlikely to exactly represent the orthography of the original publication of that cited article, anyway. If Article A cites Article B, an insistence that Article B's title as it appears in Article A is the One True Title of Article B is pure original research (namely novel analysis/interpretation). :-) Some journal citation styles impose sentence case even on book titles, while WP does the exact opposite (for English ones; follow the orthography of the other language for French, Spanish, German, etc., titles).
 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  21:57, 23 June 2018 (UTC)

Okay. Thanks for the well-reasoned reply, Stanton. I concede to your expertise. (And you didn't even have to resort to insulting me! Much appreciated.) nagualdesign 22:14, 23 June 2018 (UTC)
"Five-letter rule"? I thought the rule was to lowercase words with a single unaccented syllable, and capitalize anything with multiple syllables or where the single syllable is accented. One could plausibly pronounce "P versus" as a dactyl, but I think most people would include an accent on the first syllable of versus, and either way it's two syllables. I guess the test case is "into": should it be lowercased in titles? —David Eppstein (talk) 01:41, 24 June 2018 (UTC)

Partially bolded words

MOS:NOBOLD explicitly forbids using boldface in expansions of acronyms. I'm sure boldface should never be partially applied to words, e.g. in expansions of portmanteaus. I'm not sure about italics though. wumbolo ^^^ 22:49, 26 July 2018 (UTC)

Doing "The name Texarkana is a portmanteau of Texas and Arkansas, as the city lies at their shared border" is the same case as "The CIA (Central Intelligence Aency) ...": It's brow-beating readers as if they have lost half their IQ points and can't read or think without hand-holding and steering to the obvious. Doing it with italics isn't better than doing it with bold (or underline, or color, or font-size, or any other gimmick). And it wouldn't work as intended in most cases, because discussions of portmanteau words/names and their etymologies are a words-as-words circumstance that generally calls for italics around the entire words anyway.

The only reasons I can think of, off the top of my head, to partially italicize a word/name would be:

  • To emphasize a crucial distinction that would be easy to miss: "Wikipedia content that is not likely to be controversial must be verifiable not necessarily verified yet." Use in actual articles should be very sparing, probably mostly consigned to philosophy and related subjects.
  • To indicate a half-English and half-foreign compound that is not fully assimilated into English: "She won the title game with a daring semi-massé shot." This would be done with {{lang}}, not manual italicization.
  • To faithfully reproduce quoted material: "Robert Anton Wilson famously wrote that 'When you assume you make as ass of u and me.'"
  • To explicitly indicate a trademark stylization: "XYZed Inc. (stylized XYZed) is a Canadian weasel-shaving company founded in ...". And we probably wouldn't do this anyway. We only do this when the logo is markedly-enough different from our article title that it might confuse a few readers if such a note were absent, e.g., at Client (band): "Client (frequently stylised as CLIEИT) are ...".

I'm trying to think of a case where we'd do this with boldface, and I'm coming up completely blank, except for the "indicate a trademark stylization" case, with the same "we probably wouldn't do it" caveat. Even in the quotation case, MOS:CONFORM would have us reduce excessive emphasis to our calmer italics.
 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  22:54, 1 August 2018 (UTC)

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