Categories are not my thing but do you think there are enough articles now or will be ever to make this necessary? Other than Finger billiards and possibly Carrom, what else is there?--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 11:12, 18 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Crud fits for sure. And if the variant in it is sourceable, I'm sure some military editor will fork it into a separate article eventually. I think at least some variants of bar billiards are played with hands and some bagatelle split-offs probably were, too (Shamos goes into loads of them, but I get them all mixed up, mostly because they have foreign names). And there's bocce billiards, article I've not written yet. Very fun game. Kept my sister and I busy for 3 hours once. Her husband (Air Force doctor) actually plays crud on a regular basis; maybe there's a connection. She beat me several times, so it must be from crud-playing. Hand pool might be its own article eventually. Anyway, I guess it depends upon your "categorization politics". Mine are pretty liberal - I like to put stuff into a logical category as long as there are multiple items for it (there'll be two as soon as you're done with f.b., since we have crud), and especially if there are multiple parent categories (that will be the case here), and especially especially if the split parallels the category structure of another related category branch (I can't think of a parallel here, so this criterion of mine is not a check mark in this case), and so on. A bunch of factors really. I kind of wallow in that stuff. Not sure why I dig the category space so much. Less psychodrama, I guess. >;-) In my entire time here, I can only think of maybe one categorization decision I've made that got nuked at CfD. And I'm a pretty aggressive categorizer, too; I totally overhauled Category:Pinball just for the heck of it and will probably do the same to Category:Darts soon.

PS: I'm not wedded to the "cueless billiards" name idea; it just seemed more concise than "cueless developments from cue sports" or whatever.— SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ʕ(^Õل^ō)ˀ Contribs. 11:44, 18 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I have no "categorization politics". It's not an area that I think about a lot or has ever interested me so it's good there are people like you. If there is to be a category on this, "cueless billiards" seems fine to me. By the way, just posted Yank Adams as an adjunct to the finger billiards article I started.--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 11:57, 18 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Cool; I'd never even heard of him. This one looks like a good DYK; just the fact that there was Finger Billiards World Championship contention is funky enough, probably. You still citing that old version of Shamos? You really oughta get the 1999 version; it can be had from Amazon for cheap and has a bunch of updates. I actually put my old version in the recycle bin as not worth saving. Heh. PS: You seen Stein & Rubino 3rd ed.? I got one for the xmas before the one that just passed, from what was then a really good girlfriend. >;-) It's a-verra, verra nahce. Over 100 new pages, I think (mostly illustrations). — SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ʕ(^Õل^ō)ˀ Contribs. 13:41, 18 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

If I happen to come across it in a used book store I might pick it up. There's nothing wrong with citing the older edition (as I've said to you before). I had not heard of Adams before yesterday either. Yank is apparently not his real name, though I'm not sure what it is yet. Not sure there will be enough on him to make a DYK (though don't count it out). Of course, since I didn't userspace it, I have 4½ days to see. Unfortunately, I don't have access to ancestry.com and have never found any free database nearly as useful for finding newspaper articles (and census, birth certificates, and reams of primary source material). I tried to sign up for a free trial again which worked once before, but they got smart and are logging those who signed up previously. I just looked; the new Stein and Rubino is about $280. I'll work from the 2nd edition:-)--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 14:16, 18 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Hmm... I haven't tried Ancestry in a while. They're probably logging IP addresses. That would definitely affect me, since mine doesn't change except once every few years. I guess that's what libraries and stuff are for. S&R: Should be available cheaper. Mine came with the Blue Book of Pool Cues too for under $200 total. Here it is for $160, plus I think the shipping was $25. Stein gives his e-mail address as that page. If you ask him he might give you the 2-book deal too, or direct you to where ever that is. Shamos: Not saying its an unreliable source (although the newer version actually corrected some entries), it's just cool because it has more stuff in it. :-) DYK: Hey, you could speedily delete your own article, sandbox it and come back. Heh. Seriously, I'll see if I can get into Ancestry again and look for stuff on him. I want to look for William Hoskins stuff anyway so I can finish that half of the Spinks/Hoskins story, which has sat in draft form for over a year. I get sidetracked... — SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ʕ(^Õل^ō)ˀ Contribs. 14:29, 18 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

It's not IPs they're logging, it's your credit card. You have to give them one in order to get the trial so that they can automatically charge you if you miss the cancellation deadline. Regarding the Blue Book, of all these books, that's the one that get's stale, that is, if you use it for actual quotes, which I do all the time, both for answer to questions and for selling, buying, etc. Yeah I start procrastinating too. I did all that work on Mingaud and now I can't get myself to go back. I also did reams of research on Hurricane Tony Ellin (thugh I found so little; I really felt bad when he died; I met him a few times, seemed like a really great guy), Masako Katsura and others but still haven't moved on them.--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 18:31, 18 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Ah, the credit card. I'll have to see if the PayPal plugin has been updated to work with the new Firefox. If so, that's our solution - it generates a new valid card number every time you use it (they always feed from your single PayPal account). — SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ʕ(^Õل^ō)ˀ Contribs. 18:37, 18 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

PayPal Plugin ist kaput. Some banks now issue credit card accounts that make use of virtual card numbers, but mine's not one of them. — SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ʕ(^Õل^ō)ˀ Contribs. 19:49, 8 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for trying. It was worth a shot. I signed up for a newspaperarchive.com three month trial. As far as newspaper results go it seems quite good so far, and the search interface is many orders of magnitude better than ancestry's, but it has none of the genealogical records that ancestry provides. With ancestry I could probably find census info on Yank as well as death information (as well as for Masako Katsura, which I've been working on it for a few days; she could actually be alive, though she'd be 96).--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 04:52, 9 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Sad...[edit]

How well forgotten some very well known people are. The more I read about Yank Adams, the more I realize he was world famous. Yet, he's almost completely unknown today and barely mentioned even in modern billiard texts.--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 13:47, 21 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Reading stuff from that era, it's also amazing how important billiards (in the three-ball sense) was back then, with sometimes multiple-page stories in newspapers about each turn in a long match, and so on. It's like snooker is today in the UK. PS: I saw that you found evidence of a billiards stage comedy there. I'd never heard of it! — SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ʕ(^Õل^ō)ˀ Contribs. 15:17, 21 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Jackpot. Portrait, diagrams, sample shot descriptions and more (that will also lend itself to the finger billiards article).--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 01:34, 22 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Nice find! — SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ʕ(^Õل^ō)ˀ Contribs. 06:07, 27 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Some more notes: they bought Royal Worcester in 1983 and sold it the next year, keeping some of the electronics part.[3]; info about making records:[4]; the chair in 1989 was Lord Jenkin of Roding:[5]; "In 1880, crystalate balls made of nitrocellulose, camphor, and alcohol began to appear. In 1926, they were made obligatory by the Billiards Association and Control Council, the London-based governing body." Amazing Facts: The Indispensable Collection of True Life Facts and Feats. Richard B. Manchester - 1991wGtDHsgbtltnpBg&ct=result&id=v0m-h4YgKVYC&dq=%2BCrystalate; a website about crystalate and other materials used for billiard balls:No5 Balls.html. Fences&Windows 23:37, 12 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks! I'll have to have a look at this stuff in more detail. — SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ʕ(^Õل^ō)ˀ Contribs. 15:54, 16 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I've worked most of it in. Fences&Windows 16:01, 17 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Cool! From what I can tell, entirely different parties held the trademark in different markets. I can't find a link between Crystalate Mfg. Co. Ltd. (mostly records, though billiard balls early on) and the main billiard ball mfr. in the UK, who later came up with "Super Crystalate". I'm not sure the term was even used in the U.S. at all, despite the formulation having been originally patented there. — SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ʕ(^Õل^ō)ˀ Contribs. 21:04, 17 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]

No one has actually objected to the idea that it's really pointless for WP:SAL to contain any style information at all, other than in summary form and citing MOS:LIST, which is where all of WP:SAL's style advice should go, and SAL page should move back to WP:Stand-alone lists with a content guideline tag. Everyone who's commented for 7 months or so has been in favor of it. I'd say we have consensus to start doing it. — SMcCandlish   Talk⇒ ɖ∘¿¤þ   Contrib. 13:13, 2 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I'll take a look at the page shortly. Thanks for the nudge. SilkTork ^{✔Tea time} 23:19, 2 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

That page looks like a hinterland (you go back two users in the history and you're in August). Are you familiar with WP:MCQ? By the way, did you see my response on the balkline averages?--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 15:54, 6 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah, I did a bunch of archiving yesterday. This page was HUGE. It'll get there again. I'd forgotten MCQ existed. Can you please add it to the DAB hatnote at top of and "See also" at bottom of WP:COPYRIGHT? Its conspicuous absence is precisely why I ened up at Wikipedia talk:FAQ/Copyright! Haven't seen your balkline response yet; will go look. — SMcCandlish  Talk⇒ ɖ^⊝כ^⊙þ Contrib. 21:34, 6 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah, we did get along on Donkeys. And probably will get along on some other stuff again later. Best way to handle WP is to take it issue by issue and then let bygones be bygones. I'm finding some interesting debates over things like the line between a subspecies, a landrace and a breed. Just almost saw someone else's GA derailed over a "breed versus species" debate that was completely bogus, we just removed the word "adapt" and life would have been fine. I'd actually be interested in seeing actual scholarly articles that discuss these differences, particularly the landrace/breed issue in general, but in livestock in particular, and particularly as applied to truly feral/landrace populations (if, in livestock, there is such a thing, people inevitably will do a bit of culling, sorting and other interference these days). I'm willing to stick to my guns on the WPEQ naming issue, but AGF in all respects. Truce? Montanabw^(talk) 22:40, 6 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Truce, certainly. I'm not here to pick fights, just improve the consistency for readers and editors. I don't think there will be any scholarly articles on differences between landrace and breed, because there's nothing really to write about. Landrace has clear definitions in zoology and botany, and breed not only doesn't qualify, it is only established as true in any given case by reliable sources. Basically, no one anywhere is claiming "This is the Foobabaz horse, and it is a new landrace!" That wouldn't make sense. What is happening is people naming and declaring new alleged breeds on an entirely self-interested, profit-motive basis, with no evidence anyone other than the proponent and a few other experimental breeders consider it a breed. WP is full of should-be-AfD'd articles of this sort, like the cat one I successfully prod'ed last week. Asking for a reliable source that something is a landrace rather than a breed is backwards; landrace status is the default, not a special condition. It's a bit like asking for a scholarly piece on whether pig Latin is a real language or not; no one's going to write a journal paper about that because "language" (and related terms like "dialect", "language family", "creole" in the linguistic sense, etc.) have clear definitions in linguistics, while pig Latin, an entirely artificial, arbitrary, intentionally-managed form of communication (like an entirely artificial, arbitrary, intentionally managed form of domesticated animal) does not qualify. :-) The "what is a breed" question, which is also not about horses any more than cats or cavies or ferrets, is going to be a separate issue to resolve from the naming issue. Looking over what we collaboratively did with donkeys – and the naming form that took, i.e. Poitou donkey not Poitou (donkey), I think I'm going to end up on your side of that one. It needs to be discussed more broadly in an RFC, because most projects use the parenthetical form, because this is what WT:AT is most readily interpretable as requiring. — SMcCandlish  Talk⇒ ɖ^⊝כ^⊙þ Contrib. 00:12, 7 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I hate the drama of an RfC, particularly when we can just look at how much can be naturally disambiguated, but if you think it's an actual issue, I guess ping me when it goes up. As for landcraces, it may be true ("clear definitions") but you would be doing God's (or someone's) own good work if you were to improve landrace which has few references, fewer good ones, and is generally not a lot of help to those of us trying to sort out WTF a "landrace" is... (smiles). As for breed, that is were we disagree: At what point do we really have a "breed" as opposed to a "landrace?" Fixed traits, human-selected? At what degree, at which point? How many generations? I don't even know if there IS such a thing as a universal definition of what a "breed" is: seriously: [6] or breed or [7]. I think you and I agree that the Palomino horse can never be a "breed" because it is impossible for the color to breed true (per an earlier discussion) so we have one limit. But while I happen agree to a significant extent with your underlying premise that when Randy from Boise breeds two animals and says he has created a new breed and this is a problem, (I think it's a BIG problem in the worst cases) but if we want to get really fussy, I suppose that the aficionados of the Arabian horse who claim the breed is pure from the dawn of time are actually arguing it is a landrace, wouldn't you say? And what DO we do with the multi-generational stuff that's in limbo land? Montanabw^(talk) 00:41, 7 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not really certain what the answers are to any of those questions, another reason (besides your "STOP!" demands :-) that I backed away rapidly from moving any more horse articles around. But it's something that is going to have to be looked into. I agree that the Landrace article here is poor. For one thing, it needs to split Natural breed out into its own article (a natural breed is a selectively-bred formal breed the purpose of which is to refine and "lock-in" the most definitive qualities of a local landrace). This in turn isn't actually the same thing as a traditional breed, though the concepts are related. Basically, three breeding concepts are squished into one article. — SMcCandlish  Talk⇒ ɖ^⊝כ^⊙þ Contrib. 00:52, 7 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Side comment: I tend to support one good overview article over three poor content forks, just thinking aloud... Montanabw^(talk) 23:01, 7 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Sure; the point is that the concepts have to be separately, clearly treated, because they are not synonymous at all. — SMcCandlish  Talk⇒ ɖ^⊝כ^⊙þ Contrib. 02:07, 8 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Given that the article isn't well-sourced yet, I think that you might want to add something about that to landrace now, just to give whomever does article improvement on it later (maybe you, I think this is up your alley!) has the "ping" to do so. Montanabw^(talk) 21:55, 8 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Aye, it's on my to-do list. — SMcCandlish  Talk⇒ ɖ^⊝כ^⊙þ Contrib. 22:25, 8 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Although I have been an evolutionary biologist for decades, I only noticed the term "landrace" within the past year or two (in reference to corn), because I work with wildland plants. But I immediately knew what it was, from context. I'm much less certain about breeds, beyond that I am emphatic that they are human constructs. Montanabw and I have discussed my horse off-wiki, and from what I can tell, breeders are selecting for specific attributes (many people claim to have seen a horse "just like him"), but afaik there is no breed "Idaho stock horse". Artificially-selected lineages can exist without anyone calling them "breeds"; I'm not sure they would even be "natural breeds", and such things are common even within established breeds (Montanabw could probably explain to us the difference between Polish and Egyptian Arabians).

The good thing about breeds wrt Wikipedia is that we can use WP:RS and WP:NOTABLE to decide what to cover. Landraces are a different issue: if no one has ever called a specific, distinctive, isolated mustang herd a landrace, is it OR for Wikipedia to do so?--Curtis Clark (talk) 16:21, 7 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I have been reluctant to use landrace much out of a concern that the concept is a bit OR, as I hadn't heard of it before wikipedia either (but I'm more a historian than an evolutionary biologist, so what do I know?): Curtis, any idea where this did come from? It's a useful concept, but I am kind of wondering where the lines are between selective breeding and a "natural" breed -- of anything. And speaking of isolated Mustang herds, we have things like Kiger Mustang, which is kind of interesting. I think that at least some of SMc's passion comes from the nuttiness seen in a lot of the dog and cat breeders these days, am I right? I mean, Chiweenies? Montanabw^(talk) 23:01, 7 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

The first use of the word that I saw referred to different landraces of corn growing in different elevations and exposures in indigenous Maya areas of modern Mexico. I haven't tracked down the references for the use of the word, but the concept seems extremely useful. My sense is that landraces form as much through natural selective processes of cultivation or captivity as through human selection, so that if the "garbage wolf" hypothesis for dog domestication is true, garbage wolves would have been a landrace (or more likely several, in different areas). One could even push the definition and say that MRSA is a landrace. But I don't have enough knowledge of the reliable sources to know how all this would fit into Wikipedia.--Curtis Clark (talk) 01:01, 8 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Landraces form, primarily and quickly, through mostly natural selection, long after domestication. E.g. the St Johns water dog and Maine Coon cat are both North American landraces that postdate European arrival on the continent. — SMcCandlish  Talk⇒ ɖ^⊝כ^⊙þ Contrib. 20:16, 9 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I see some potential for some great research on this and a real improvement to the articles in question. Montanabw^(talk) 21:55, 8 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Yep. — SMcCandlish  Talk⇒ ɖ^⊝כ^⊙þ Contrib. 20:16, 9 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

The sentence at MOS:LIFE "General names for groups or types of organisms are not capitalized except where they contain a proper name (oak, Bryde's whales, rove beetle, Van cat)" is a bit odd, since the capitalization would (now) be exactly the same if they were the names of individual species. Can it simply be removed?

There is an issue, covered at Wikipedia:PLANTS#The use of botanical names as common names for plants, which may or may not be worth putting in the main MOS, namely cases where the same word is used as the scientific genus name and as the English name, when it should be de-capitalized. I think this is rare for animals, but more common for plants and fungi (although I have seen "tyrannosauruses" and similar uses of dinosaur names). Peter coxhead (talk) 09:17, 3 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

1. I would leave it a alone for now; let people get used to the changes. I think it's reasonable to include the "general names" thing, because it's a catch-all that includes several different kinds of examples, that various largely different groups of people are apt to capitalize. Various know-nothings want to capitalize things like "the Cats", the "Great Apes", etc., because they think "it's a Bigger Group and I like to Capitalize Big Important Stuff". There are millions more people who just like to capitalize nouns and stuff. "Orange's, $1 a Pound". Next we have people who insist on capitalizing general "types" and landraces of domestic animals ("Mountain Dogs", "Van Cat") because they're used to formal breed names being capitalized (whether to do that with breeds here is an open question, but it should not be done with types/classes of domestics, nor with landraces. Maybe the examples can be sculpted better: "the roses", "herpesviruses", "great apes", "Bryde's whale", "mountain dogs", "Van cat", "passerine birds". I'm not sure that "rove beetle" and "oak" are good examples of anything. Anyway, it's more that the species no-capitalization is a special case of the more general rule, not that the general rule is a redundant or vague version of the former. If they're merged, it should keep the general examples, and maybe specifically spell out and illustrate that it also means species and subspecies, landraces and domestic "types", as well as larger and more general groupings.
2. I had noticed that point and was going to add it, along with some other points from both NCFLORA and NCFAUNA, soon to MOS:ORGANISMS, which I feel is nearing "go live" completion. Does that issue come up often enough to make it a MOS mainpage point? I wouldn't really object to it, and it could be had by adding an "(even if it coincides with a capitalized Genus name)" parenthetical to the "general names" bit. The pattern is just common enough in animals to have been problematic if it were liable to be problematic, as it were. I.e., I don't see a history of squabbling about it at Lynx or its talk page, and remember looking into this earlier with some other mammal, about two weeks ago, and not seeing evidence of confusion or editwarring. The WP:BIRDS people were actually studiously avoiding that problem; I remember seeing a talk page discussion at the project that agreed that such usage shouldn't be capitalized ever. PS: With Lynx, I had to go back to 2006, in the thick of the "Mad Capitalization Epidemic" to find capitalization there[8], and it wasn't even consistent, just in the lead.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  11:11, 3 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

1. Well, certainly "rove beetle" and "oak" are poor examples here, so I would support changing to some of the others you suggested above.
2. I think the main problem we found with plants was it being unclear as to whether inexperienced editors meant the scientific name or the English name. So you would see a sentence with e.g. "Canna" in the middle and not know whether this should be corrected to "Canna" or to "canna". The plural is clear; "cannas" is always lower-case non-italicized. The singular is potentially ambiguous. Whether it's worth putting this point in the main MOS I just don't know since I don't much edit animal articles and never breed articles, which is why I asked you. Peter coxhead (talk) 21:55, 3 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

1. Will take a look at that later, if someone else doesn't beat me to it.
2. Beats me. Doesn't seem too frequent an issue, but lot of MOS stuff isn't. Definitely should be in MOS:ORGANISMS, regardless.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  00:46, 4 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Worked on both of those a bit at MOS. We'll see if it sticks.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  01:18, 5 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Finish patching up WP:WikiProject English language with the stuff from User:SMcCandlish/WikiProject English Language, and otherwise get the ball rolling.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  20:22, 17 August 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Somehow, I forget quite how, I came across this - that is an excellent summary of the distinctions. I often get confused over those, and your examples were very clear. Is something like that in the general MoS/citation documentation? Oh, and while I am here, what is the best way to format a citation to a page of a document where the pages are not numbered? All the guidance I have found says not to invent your own numbering by counting the pages (which makes sense), but I am wondering if I can use the 'numbering' used by the digitised form of the book. I'll point you to an example of what I mean: the 'book' in question is catalogued here (note that is volume 2) and the digitised version is accessed through a viewer, with an example of a 'page' being here, which the viewer calls page 116, but there are no numbers on the actual book pages (to confuse things further, if you switch between single-page and double-page view, funny things happen to the URLs, and if you create and click on a single-page URL the viewer seems to relocate you one page back for some reason). Carcharoth (talk) 19:10, 12 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]

@Carcharoth: Thanks. I need to copy that into an essay page. As far as I know, the concepts are not clearly covered in any of those places, nor clearly enough even at Help:CS1 (which is dense and overlong as it is). The e-book matters bear some researching. I'm very curious whether particular formats (Nook, etc.) paginate consistently between viewers. For Web-accessible ones, I would think that the page numbering that appears in the Web app is good enough if it's consistent (e.g., between a PC and a smart phone) when the reader clicks the URL in the citation. I suppose one could also use |at= to provide details if the "page" has to be explained in some way. I try to rely on better-than-page-number locations when possible, e.g. specific entries in dictionaries and other works with multiple entries per page (numbered sections in manuals, etc.), but for some e-books this isn't possible – some are just continuous texts. One could probably use something like |at=in the paragraph beginning "The supersegemental chalcolithic metastasis is ..." about 40% into the document, in a pinch. I guess we do need to figure this stuff out since such sources are increasingly common.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  20:29, 13 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Yes (about figuring out how to reference e-books), though I suspect existing (non-WP) citation styles have addressed this already (no need to re-invent the wheel). This is a slightly different case, though. It is a digitisation of an existing (physical) book that has no page numbers. If I had the book in front of me (actually, it was only published as a single copy, so it is not a 'publication' in that traditional sense of many copies being produced), the problem with page numbers would still exist. I wonder if the 'digital viewer' should be thought of as a 'via' thingy? In the same way that (technically) Google Books and archive.org digital copies of old books are just re-transmitting, and re-distributing the material (is wikisource also a 'via' sort of thing?). Carcharoth (talk) 23:13, 13 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]

@Carcharoth: Ah, I see. I guess I would treat it as a |via=, and same with WikiSource, which in this respect is essentially like Google Books or Project Gutenberg. I think your conundrum has come up various times with arXiv papers, that have not been paginated visibly except in later publication (behind a journal paywall and not examined). Back to the broader matter: Some want to treat WikiSource and even Gutenberg as republishers, but I think that's giving them undue editorial credit and splitting too fine a hair. Was thinking on the general unpaginated and mis-paginated e-sources matter while on the train, and came to the conclusion that for a short, unpaginated work with no subsections, one might give something like |at=in paragraph 23, and for a much longer one use the |at=in the paragraph beginning "..." trick. A straight up |pages=82–83 would work for an e-book with hard-coded meta-data pagination that is consistent between apps/platforms and no visual pagination. On the other hand, use the visual pagination in an e-book that has it, even if it doesn't match the e-book format's digital pagination, since the pagination in the visual content would match that of a paper copy; one might include a note that the pagination is that visible in the content if it conflicts with what the e-book reader says (this comes up a lot with PDFs, for one thing - I have many that include cover scans, and the PDF viewers treat that as p. 1, then other front matter as p. 2, etc., with the content's p. 1 being something like PDF p. 7).  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  08:07, 14 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]

You had previously asked that protection be lowered on WP:MEDMOS which was not done at that time. I have just unprotected the page and so if you have routine update edits to make you should now be able to do so. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 06:42, 25 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks. I don't remember what it was, but maybe it'll come back to me.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  12:17, 25 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Now I remember.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  06:53, 11 February 2020 (UTC)[reply]

@SMcCandlish:

I stumbled upon Category:Editnotices whose targets are redirects and there are ~100 pages whose pages have been moved, but the editnotices are still targeted to the redirect page. Seems like a great, and sort of fun, WikiGnoming activity for a template editor such as yourself. I'd do it, but I'm not a template editor. Not sure if that's really your thing, though. ;-)

Cheers,
--Doug Mehus T·C 22:30, 6 February 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Argh. I would've hoped some bot fixed that kind of stuff. I'll consider it, but it's a lot of work for low benefit (the page names may be wrong, but the redirs still get there), and it's been my experience that a lot of editnotices (especially in mainspace) are PoV-pushing crap that needs to be deleted anyway.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  07:20, 11 February 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I'm going to pass for the nonce, Dmehus. Working on some other project (more fun than WP is sometimes). I'll let it sit here with {{Unresolved}} on it, in case I get inspired to work on it some, but it might be a long time.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  07:46, 18 February 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Don't forget to deal with: Template talk:Cquote#Template-protected edit request on 19 April 2020.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  14:48, 20 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Not sure the ping went through, so noting here. Just spotted where a now-blocked user moved a bunch of animal breed articles back to parenthetical disambiguation from natural disambiguation. As they did it in October and I'm only catching it now, I only moved back two just in case there was some kind of consensus change. The equine ones are definitely against project consensus, the rest are not my wheelhouse but I'm glad to comment. Talk:Campine_chicken#Here_we_go_again. Montanabw^(talk) 20:14, 25 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

@Montanabw: Argh. Well, this is easy to fix with a request to mass-revert undiscussed moves, at the subsection for that at WP:RMTR. Some admin will just fix it all in one swoop. While I have the PageMover bit, and could do it myself as a technical possibility, I would run afoul of WP:INVOLVED in doing so.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  02:30, 4 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]

@Montanabw: Did this get fixed yet? If not, I can look into it.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  08:13, 20 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]

A user talk page isn't where to propose a change to a guideline. But what would probably actually happen is that "In titles of published works, follow the capitalization rule for each part [after a hyphen] independently" in MOS:HYPHEN would probably be removed, because it does not match actual practice (which is predominantly to use titles like "Evidence Suggesting Pre-adaptation to Domestication Throughout the Small Felidae" not "...Pre-Adaptation...". As for "Three-fifth Compromise", MOS:CAPS: "Wikipedia relies on sources to determine what is conventionally capitalized; only words and phrases that are consistently capitalized in a substantial majority of independent, reliable sources are capitalized in Wikipedia." Your "plenty of sources" dopesn't translate to "substantial majority".

"Coca-Cola" and "Spider-Man" are trademarks that are near-universally spelled that way in sources. The last two of those should probably move to "Quasi-war" and "Employment Non-discrimination Act" unless RS demonstrate that is is nearly always given with a capitalized "War" and "Discrimination" (if they do, then the renames should not happen). The fact you can find a handful of exceptions to our general practice is meaningless, because WP is written by humans and they are not consistent, and per WP:P&G: "Editors should attempt to follow guidelines, though they are best treated with common sense, and occasional exceptions may apply." These exceptions are arrived at by editorial consensus on a case-by-case basis, and we have various articles that diverge from what MoS or naming conventions or even the article titles policy expect because the sources indicate that an exception should be made and consensus imposes such an exception in that case. E.g. CCH Pounder does not follow MOS:INITIALS and Spider-Man: Far From Home does not follow MOS:5LETTER, and neither case is accidental. The existence of exceptions (due to either laziness/ignorance regarding the rule or a consensus to diverge from it in a particular case) does not mean the guidelines are broken.

At any rate, I have no idea why, when you find a rule the gist of which is "do not capitalize after a hyphen" (except in a proper name like Graeco-Roman that is consistently written that way by RS) you would want to introduce more inconsistency and confusion about this, just to selectively mimic AP News, Forbes, and some other off-site publishers who have nothing to do with our style manual. They are not following our style manual but their own ones. Unless treatment of a term/name across pretty much all of English-language publishing is uniformly doing something against our style manual, we have no reason to do something with that text string that is against our style manual.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  00:46, 2 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Normally I would apologize in advance for delivering a WP:WALLOFTEXT response, but since you just wrote one to me, I figured we were good :)

• A user talk page isn't where to propose a change to a guideline. Well yeah, obviously I wasn't trying to propose a guideline change here. I was saying that I would consider making a proposal at WT:MOS and/or WT:NCCAPS to change the guideline if your interpretation is accurate (which I assume you're saying that it is).
• But what would probably actually happen is that "In titles of published works, [...]" in MOS:HYPHEN would probably be removed, because it does not match actual practice MOS:HYPHEN is supplemented by MOS:TITLECAPS, which directly contradicts the last part of your claim: "The general rule in English is to not capitalize after a hyphen unless what follows the hyphen is itself usually capitalized (e.g. post-Soviet). However, this rule is often ignored in titles of works."
• Your "plenty of sources" dopesn't translate to "substantial majority". If you're looking for hundreds and thousands of sources that use the term "Three-Fifths Compromise", I hate to break it to you, but unlike Spider-Man and Coca-Cola, there aren't going to be many talking about a 200-year-old compromise. But I have provided a list of highly reliable sources that capitalize "Fifths" — the rest I found actually lowercase the entire phrase, including "three", but that is not WP:CONSISTENT with every other article in Category:Political compromises in the United States and would therefore not work for us. TITLECAPS specifically says to refer to sources, and in this case the majority is to capitalize (I found not a single source that capitalized "Three" but not "fifths").
• The fact you can find a handful of exceptions to our general practice is meaningless It's not a "handful of exceptions", it's the majority. Before you ask, no, I do not have statistical evidence to support that, because it would be impossible (as far as I know) to compile a list of articles about proper nouns that are hyphenated — no regular expression would be able to determine what is a proper and common noun, unless there is a magical formula that I am not aware of. But since you asked for more examples/evidence, I went to WP:FA and did a Ctrl+F search for all the hyphens on the page. Of the 45 articles where the hyphenated title was a proper noun that was not a person or place name, and where the hyphen was followed by a common noun, only five used lowercase: 2019 WPA World Ten-ball Championship, Ninety-five Theses, Sonic X-treme, The Lord of the Rings: The Battle for Middle-earth II, and Trembling Before G-d. The latter three don't even count — the hyphen is not being used to connect two words for Sonic and Trembling, and "Middle-earth" is specifically singled out at MOS:HYPHEN (and TITLECAPS) because it is pretty much the only published work universally spelled with a lowercase "earth". So you see, "Three-fifths compromise" (and Ninety-five Theses and 2019 WPA World Ten-ball Championship) are the outliers, not the norm. If our MOS really does call for lowercase, it does not reflect the actual practice at all.
• These exceptions are arrived at by editorial consensus on a case-by-case basis And they should be applied to cases where sources universally go against the norm of capitalizing after a hyphen in proper nouns, such as "Middle-earth". To reiterate, the norm for proper nouns is to capitalize after a hyphen. Can you name a hyphenated trademark where this isn't the case?
• At any rate, I have no idea why, when you find a rule [...] you would want to introduce more inconsistency and confusion about this, just to selectively mimic AP News, Forbes, and some other off-site publishers who have nothing to do with our style manual. First off, that sounded a little aggressive, but I've seen worse. Capitalizing after a hyphen does not make things inconsistent; it's what the world has been doing and we've been doing in practice, so changing the guideline would make the outliers consistent with the norm.
• Lastly, before I start prepping my proposal, I once again ask, are you certain your interpretation is correct? I just looked at MOS:HYPHENCAPS, and it offers a slightly different wording: "In article text, do not use a capital letter after a hyphen except for terms that would ordinarily be capitalized in running prose, such as proper names, demonyms and brand names." This sounds even more ambiguous than MOS:HYPHEN, leading me to wonder whether the MoS really means to capitalize after a hyphen for proper names, demonyms, and brand names. Or maybe that's just me.

InfiniteNexus (talk) 07:01, 2 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

In the same order as above (and, yes, stuff like this often involves a lot of detailed argument):

• Why? I repeat: "I have no idea why, when you find a rule the gist of which is "do not capitalize after a hyphen" (except in a proper name like Graeco-Roman that is consistently written that way by RS) you would want to introduce more inconsistency and confusion about this". See below on why it introduces confusion and inconsistency.
  But maybe we can short-circuit this and all my reponses below were a waste of time. You came here particularly about Three-fifths Compromise, and if that's really all you're on about, then I have to observe that a large number of sources do not capitalize any element of this, so it its not consistently treated as a proper name and should be moved to Three-fifths compromise per MOS:CAPS and WP:NCCAPS, and that would make this whole discussion moot. But I'll go over the rest in case your concern is broader.
• "Often ignored" = "the capitalization is done very inconsistently in sources". Per MOS:CAPS: "Wikipedia relies on sources to determine what is conventionally capitalized; only words and phrases that are consistently capitalized in a substantial majority of independent, reliable sources are capitalized in Wikipedia." So if a work title like "Evidence Suggesting Pre-adaptation to Domestication Throughout the Small Felidae" is not near-universally presented in independent sources with "Pre-Adaptation" in it (when given in title case) then it should have "Pre-adaptation" in it (when given in title case), and must default to "Pre-adaptation" if there is insufficient RS mention of that title to do much of a head-count – for the same reason that "method acting" should be given in WP as "method acting" not as "Method Acting", because the preponderance of sources independent of the subject do not capitalize it. What we have here is a subtle WP:POLICYFORK in which MOS:TITLES and a titles-related line-item at MOS:HYPHEN have been drifting away from the MOS:CAPS central rule, on a basis ("some sources like to do it") that MOS:CAPS explicitly rejects. This needs to be repaired, not worsened.
• This point is actually addressed by the one above, really. If there are insufficient sources to demonstrate a clear preference across English writing that pertains to the topic in question, then do what MoS defaults to, which is lower-case. In this particular case, it might actually be that there are sufficient sources to support a "Three-Fifths" exception, but even if there were that would not indicate any need for any RfC to change any guideline. The only need demonstrated for such an RfC or other discussion is to re-normalize MOS:TITLES and the abberrant related MOS:HYPHEN line item back into agreement with MOS:CAPS.
• WP:FA search: In doing a Ctrl-F there myself, what I see is that almost all of the titles there (also ignoring persons and places) with hyphens in them and a capital after the hyphen are in one of the following classes: 1) have an independent proper name after the hyphen (Saint-Gaudens double eagle, Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Rolls-Royce Merlin, Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition, Franco-Mongol alliance, Sino-Roman relations, etc., etc., etc.; or 2) are cases of following the style preferred by a trademark holder or other originator of a proper name (several examples, but one was Inter-Allied Women's Conference, which is also contraindicated by MOS:TM by default, but which might be permissible in those specific cases, e.g. if "Inter-Allied" is used near exclusively in sources completely independent of the subject and "Inter-allied" is virtually unattested); or 3) are titles of published works which have been rendered this way because of the misleading POLICYFORK identified above (The Bread-Winners, Seventy-Six (novel)); or 4) have the hyphen followed by an all-caps acronym or other code/symbol (WBPX-TV, Tropical Depression Nineteen-E (2018), Nike-X, etc.). 2006 Chick-fil-A Bowl is interesting; it goes lower-case after the first hyphen (as it should, since "fil" it not a proper name but a fragment of the common noun fillet) but then upper-case again because the "A" there is a symbol, the letter A prounced by its name as /eɪ/, and is not just a letter representing the usual /ɑː/ sound that a would typically have at the end of an English word or name, i.e. it's not "Chick-fil-ah". (It also happens to match the official corporate name spelling and much more importantly the dominant spelling in reliable sources which is Chick-fil-A not "Chick-Fil-A", which is what you seem to be arguing for.)
  A few of the FA search results are problematic in novel ways, despite having FA icons on them, or are exceptional or edge cases. E.g. 2001–02 South-West Indian Ocean cyclone season is against MOS:COMPASS, as "South-West Indian Ocean" is not a proper name, but a general description of a vague area and not even a notable topic, so should be "south-west Indian Ocean" or "southwest Indian Ocean" (and the article text veers back and forth between these spellings, which is against MOS:CONSISTENT, too). Similarly, John Edward Brownlee as Attorney-General of Alberta is against MOS:JOBTITLES and should have "attorney-general"). Hi-Level is a weird one; actual source usage includes all of "Hi-Level", "Hi Level", "High-Level", "High Level", "high-level", "hi-level", etc., etc.; the article is unclearly written despite its FA star, and it is uncertain whether this is/was a trademark of Budd Company or just a general class-of-vehicle term that should not be capitalized at all; since it originates from the concept "high-level locomotive" or "high-level train" and is thus a compound modifer, an argument could be made to retain the hyphen even in the short form, though not all sources use it. O-Bahn Busway is another weird case, of an Ausralian road given German name; in German all nouns (Bahn means 'path, track, way, course') are capitalized; and "O-bahn" is not unattested in independent sources. That said, proper names in the form "X-Longersting usually are capitalized after the hyphen in most sources, thus D-Day naval deceptions and the non-FA D-Day. North-Eastern Area Command, North-Western Area Command (RAAF), Operation Ten-Go: special cases of official designations; we would not necessarily "obey" them, per WP:OFFICIALNAME, but RS usage strongly dominates with the capitalization (though curiously the hyphen is often dropped, even in governmental sources, in the first two cases; in the third, the proper spelling of this non-English term is actually Ten-gō, and it can be found that way in some English sources, though our "FA" doesn't really reflect this).
  Anyway, if you think that being an FA has anything at all to do with MoS compliance, you're mistaken. The tiny WP:FACTION who control FA process have evicined startling levels of anti-MoS activism over the years (up to and including hounding out of the process one of WP's best copye-ditors and fact-checkers for daring to insist on some MoS compliance in an FAC, with such viciousness that he almost quit WP entirely and has certainly withdrawn most of his participation, for several years now). They're generally in favor of whatever personal preferences the dominant editor of an article has (WP:OWN policy be damned). There is no MoS-compliance requirement in WP:FACR to begin with, and the only MoS cleanup checking that programmatically happens is at WP:GACR, and only for five kinds of compliance. All sorts of things pass GAN and FAC with style problems in them, from titles on down; it is left to editors to randomly clean them up as time and interst permit.
• Trademarks are a terrible basis for trying to decide what to do with capitalization, since one of the most frequent marketing techniques is to over-use capitalization to get attention. WP really doesn't care what companies and other trademark holders prefer (see all of MOS:TM as well as WP:OFFICIALNAME), only what reliable sources do with the name, and we only diverge from our default style when, for a specific case, the independent sources nearly always agree to style it the way the trademark holder does. Since you asked: Middle-earth itself is a trademark, of The Saul Zaentz Company d.b.a. Middle-earth Enterprises (formerly Tolkien Enterprises). As for more examples, few trademarks have hyphens in them, and when they do, they are usually joining proper names or before a code like "-XR" or "-B"; I can't find any kind of "list of hyphenated trademarks" anywhere on the Internet to examine. But we already saw that Chick-fil-A is another example.
• "Capitalizing after a hyphen [in a proper-noun phase] does not make things inconsistent": It certainly does do so because the default is to not do it otherwise, and the broader default is to not capitalize anything that is not consistently capitalized in sources. We write Mediterranean-style cuisine, so why on earth would we write something like "Bob's Mediterranean-Style Restaurant" when "Bob's Mediterranean-style Restaurant" is perfectly fine, and the first is confusingly inconsistent with all the text around it about "Mediterranean-style cuisine". The capitalization of the S in the restaurant name serves no purpose at all, and is just use of capital letters to draw the eye for marketing reasons. The only time we should do it is when, for whatever reason, independent reliable sources overwhelmingly prefer it (and there are enough of them to be statistically meaningful). Honestly, I think for most of the indivdual cases you probably care about that they'll be instances where the sources show such in the first place. Much more to the point, though, POLICYFORKing the material further and further apart so that MOS:CAPS is in more conflict with more other micro-topical concerns like a line-item in MOS:HYPHEN and a section at MOS:TITLES would by defintion be increasing inconsistency and confusion. Observing this and calling it what it is (or would be) is not "aggressive".
• The wording was weird because the latter two are examples for the former; the three don't really form an and list. It's a recently introduced [9] error. Fixed it to: "In article text, do not use a capital letter after a hyphen except for terms that would ordinarily be capitalized in running prose, such as proper names (e.g. demonyms and brand names)". This is consistent with MOS:HYPHEN, other than it hasn't been messed up by the titles-of-works "rider" that someone injected at MOS:HYPHEN (and in MOS:TITLES) and which is generally the source of the confusion and inconsistency we've been seeing here and there.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  09:35, 3 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you for the thoughtful "long-ass" response. What I'm trying to point out to you is that according to our MOS (specifically, MOS:HYPHEN), the default is Middle-earth and Chick-fil-A, while Spider-Man and Nineteen Eighty-Four are exceptions that are only permissible if an overwhelming majority of sources use a capital letter. We can safely disregard single letters (e.g. D-Day) and acronyms (WABC-TV) as those would normally be capitalized after a space in prose. The issue with this guideline is that for the vast majority of proper names, an overwhelming majority of sources do use a capital letter. Logically, Spider-Man should be the default and Middle-earth the exception, not vice versa. The published-works exception sorta, kinda does this, but published works are not the only cases where capitalization after a hyphen is the norm. You have observed yourself that almost all of our FA sample falls under "exceptions"; if everything is an exception, that means they are not exceptions but the norm.

Responding to more specific points of your response, I was not implying that FAs were the gold standard for interpreting the MoS (though I should note that WP:FA? does have an MoS compliance requirement, #2). As for Three-Fifths Compromise in particular, I am well aware that some sources use all-lowercase, but as I noted in my previous comment, this is not WP:CONSISTENT with Category:Political compromises in the United States. With that being said, I realize a hypothetical RM would have a 50/50 chance of passing given the clash between PAGs (AT is actually policy and MoS a guideline, but MoS warriors certainly are not going to let this go without a fight).

InfiniteNexus (talk) 18:26, 3 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I guess that's one way to look at it, but it is not the way I look at it. We have a general, across-every-topic-for-every-reason, default that we do not capitalize that which is not capitalized in a strong majority of independent sources. We could just stop there. The cases you are generally concerned about (trademarks and work titles) would mostly qualify as capitalized after the hyphen in a strong majority of sources. And they still will qualify even if we also say something specific like "Generally don't capitalize after a hyphen except when a proper name follows the hyphen". It's simply not broken. This discussion, however, opened with Three-fifths Compromise, which is neither a trademark nor a work title, and which turns out to not be consistently treated as a proper name in RS, so should not be capitalized anyway, but rendered "three-fifths compromise", mooting the concern in the first place.

When exceptions to a rule exist for completely unrelated reasons that does not constitute "an exception", confusing dissimilar things into one fictional category, so it cannot be exceptionality so common that it's really the norm. That's equivalent to saying that because it's okay for police to shoot criminals under various circumstances, armed forces to kill lots and lots of people in military conflicts, home-owners (in many if not most jurisdictions) to kill home invaders, and taken all together these exceed the murder rate, that the laws against homicide are wrong because killing people for these unrelated exceptions exceeds the norm against murdering people and has become the new norm. We have laws against murder because killing people for reasons that don't fall under one of those exception is something that shouldn't happen, and we have a lower-case-by-default rule because capitalizing things for reasons other than enumerated exceptions is something that shouldn't happen.

FA having a requirement to have a lead that properly summarizes the article and to be divided sensibly into sections (and to have a consistent citation style, which is not an MoS matter but a WP:CITEVAR one) is not FACR having an actual and enforced rule to follow MoS (except on two "how to not write terribly" basics that would be in there even if MoS didn't exist at all). If you actually read FAC discussions over the last decade or so, they are a morass of argument against MoS compliance.

Various other things in Category:Political compromises in the United States probably also need renaming to lower case for the same reason. WP:CONSISTENT is not a tail that wags the dog. Our article titles should be consistent to the extent that is practical, after they conform to various applicable policies and guidelines; they are not made to thwart those P&G just to be consistent temporarily with titles that themselves are wrong per the P&G. And the underlying notion that everything in a category that contains some articles on things that are treated as proper names means that they must all be proper names is clearly not tenable. See, e.g., Category:Political movements and all its many subcategories; on a portion of what is contained in them are proper names (and some things in them that are presently capitalized should not be, though many of these have been cleaned up over the last few years). We don't go capitalizing all of them, especially when MOS:DOCTCAPS is a specific rule against doing that. Maybe more the point, WP:AT has nothing to do with capitalization and never has; that's a style matter determined by MoS concerns. People get confused about this because the MOS:CAPS rule to capitalize [only] when the vast majority of the RS do so is superficially similar to WP:COMMONNAME (which again has nothing to do with style of a name; it's the policy to choose Foo over Bar if Foo is the most common name, without any regard at all to whether in a particular case it is rendered Foo, foo, F-oo, f-oo, F oo, f oo, etc. only with regard to it not being some variant of Bar).

"MoS warriors certainly are not going to let this go without a fight"? You're the one who approached this from a "the guidelines are wrong and I must change them to suit my views" battleground position, and there is no RM discussion in the entire history of that article and its talk page. What did happen is one editor inappropriately used WP:RMSPEEDY in 2011 to move it from the correct title Three-fifths compromise to Three-Fifth Compromise against three guidelines (MOS:CAPS, WP:NCCAPS, MOS:HYPHEN), and the responding RM admin should have refused because this would automatically be a controversial move; and much later, following MOS:HYPHEN but just assuming in good faith that this was actually a proper name, I moved it to Three-fifths Compromise. But I'm the one you're upset at? This comes across as another of those "give me capital letters or give me death" things, the sort of activity that the MoS regulars refer to as "style warrior" behavior: pursuing disruptive battles against MoS guideline compliance for personal style peccadillo reasons. But you want instead to pretend that people applying the guidelines as they are written are the "warriors"? When there has been zero activity to de-capitalize this as not a proper name, in the entire 18-year history of the article? Please.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  04:15, 4 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I did not call you an MoS warrior. I said that if I were to open an RM for Three-Fifths Compromise on the grounds of WP:CONSISTENT, there would likely be backlash from MoS warriors who insist MOS:CAPS takes precedence over WP:CONSISTENT. As for your murder rate example, I look at this way: we have a general rule that you should not kill people (capitalize after a hyphen). However, if you are a police officer (title of a work), soldier (trademark), or a homeowner whose home is being invaded (other proper nouns), you are permitted to use deadly force (capitalize after a hyphen) unless the circumstances do not call for it (unless the overwhelming majority of sources say otherwise). Under the current wording of MOS:HYPHEN and its associated guidelines, police officers (titles of works) are already exempted, which you are apparently against, and I am saying this exemption should be extended to soldiers and homeowners (other proper nouns).

Clearly, we do not agree on what is and should be the norm, so I will not pester you further unless you feel additional discussion is warranted. I haven't decided whether it is worth my time and energy to start an RfC, but considering the limited time I have on my hands, as well as my other more important on-wiki commitments, I am probably just going to let this go for now (not ruling out revisiting this in the future, should it ever come up again). Thank you for the ... spirited debate. InfiniteNexus (talk) 05:07, 4 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

"Other proper nouns" that are capitalized that way near-uniformly in RS are already exempted, by the very fact that they are capitalized that way near-uniformly in RS. One that is not captitalized that way near-uniformly in RS should not be exempted, or MOS:CAPS would not say what it does. This also actually applies to trademarks, and also always applied to titles of works until two individuals POLICYFORKed the material in two places (that don't even agree with each other!). What obviously needs to happen is for the material to be re-normalized back to "do not capitalize something unless it is capitalized in a strong majority of RS". What you want to do is take an alleged exception that doesn't categorically exist (trademarks) and another alleged exception that two editors made up out of nowhere but can't actually agree on, and use this doubly cracked foundation as a rationale to invent a third and even broader category of alleged exception. So, yes, I'm not going to agree with that, and I don't think much of anyone else will either, other than a handful of the same actual "style warriors" who just hate MoS in general or at least MOS:CAPS because they are not getting their pet-peeve preference that they perpetually re-re-re-litigate, on some WP:SSF or WP:CSF matter.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  05:19, 4 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I already responded to this argument above. I said that what is currently being evaluated on a case-by-case basis (whether to capitalize) should be flip-flopped with the default (whether to not capitalize). You responded with the murder-rate analogy, which I replied to, and now you're repeating your claim that whether to capitalize should be determined on a case-by-case basis, despite the fact that most sources capitalize the word after a hyphen in proper nouns. Would you like to explain why you think we should ignore the norm and take MOS:CAPS as gospel, ignoring common sense? InfiniteNexus (talk) 05:40, 4 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

That's one of those "have you stopped beating your wife?" constructions. We have a general principle at MOS:CAPS; it is expressed in narrower form in various other places, including MOS:HYPHEN, though some people have been screwing around inconsistently with the language there and this needs to be repaired. There are lots of other places the same "don't capitalize unless all the sources are doing it" principle is also expressed and employed (all throughout MoS, really). It is consistent and well-understood, even if a handful of editors WP:DONTLIKEIT because they like over-capitalizing things to better match what they are used to in ornithology journals or video-gamer websites or dog-breeding magazines or train-spotting fandom forums or whatever the specialized-style fallacy is. Then you come along and want to create a complicated counter-rule, to always capitalize after a hyphen by default for any kind of proper name (when you have to know by now that WP editors spend more time arguing about what is and is not a proper name than doing much of anything else, and that's even how this thread started to begin with). This would be confusing and divisive, set up a [further] conflict between guidelines, be abused as a wedge to drive more capitalization into the project for all sorts of other things, and cause various other problems. Meanwhile, the end result for the titles you care about would not change in any way: the ones that should be capitalized after a hyphen, because they are treated this way near-universally in independent sources, would be capitalized after a hyphen here, under both scenarios. You would cause a truckload of trouble for no practical gain of any kind.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  05:59, 4 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I am aware of the MoS's general preference for lowercase, but there are exceptions listed under almost every single MoS guideline — why shouldn't there be one for hyphens? What MOS:TITLECAPS currently says about capitalization after a hyphen is true: almost nobody does it in titles of works, and I'm arguing that the same can be said for other proper nouns. And no, there would be practical gain: outliers such as Three-fifths Compromise (assuming we treat it as a proper noun) and Ninety-five Theses would be moved to be in line with Spider-Man, Quasi-War, and Nineteen Eighty-Four, unless it is proven that the overwhelming majority of sources do not use a capital letter. InfiniteNexus (talk) 06:29, 4 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

There shouldn't be one for hyphens because they are applied for completely different reasons in different cases, and because of MOS:BLOAT. We do not need to record in MoS every time consensus comes to some kind of exception decision in a particular case, or MoS would be ten times longer and would look like nothing but a morass of exceptions and no general rules, thus defeating its purpose. But you're arguing for a broad "mega-exception" across an entire set of classes of cases. It isn't even true that lower-case after a hyphen is almost never done in titles of works. It tends not to be done in titles of movies and modern books (though there are exceptions) since it doesn't support marketing's love of capitalization to grab attention. But lower-case after a hyphen is common in article titles that are written in title case. I no longer have a collection of style guides filling up half my place, but I would bet good money there are citation styles that specifically demand lower-case after a hyphen except for a proper name. (At the other extreme are various content-management systems that automatically capitalize every single string in a title, with results like "Of" and "An" and "The" being capitalized in mid-phrase. Not something to emulate here.)

Your scenario about "Three-fifths Compromise (assuming we treat it as a proper noun) and Ninety-five Theses" would not be affected in any way by any of this at all; the first of these should provably move to three-fifths compromise (there is no "assuming we treat it as a proper noun" because it is already proven not to be one); and Luther's work would be determined by the exact same criteria under both systems: whether RS are near-consistent in capitalizing "Five").

If you're curious, they certainly are not: [10][11][12]. The prevalence of "Ninety-five Theses" without capital-F "Five" is strong evidence against your claim that sources nearly always capitalize after a hyphen in such titles. (It's also suggestive that some off-site style guides call for lowercase after a hyphen, or the style would not be so common (and WP's MoS wouldn't have come up with idea on its own), though which ones might do so would bear more direct research if someone wanted to insist on it. Ultimately it doesn't matter, because WP has its own style manual and is not dictated to by any particular external publishers.) The only thing your position for "-Five" has going for it is that in recent books, "-Five" in this title has quite suddenly become more common than "-five" [13]. But it is not so overwhelmingly dominant that MOS:CAPS would be satisfied, especially given the very long history with "-five" dominating [14], and the recent (c. 2004 onward) spike in "-Five" probably being attributable to a particular publisher or a small handful of them (probably religious publishers given the nature of the subject matter, and so not independent of the subject), and quite possibly strongly influenced by WP itself (WP:CIRCULAR) because our article title had "-Five" until 3 May 2016 (and the n-gram data ends at 2019, so we can't see what's been happening in the 2020s)‎. The fact that our article on the subject dates (with "-Five") to right when the capitalization suddenly started increasing in books is very suspicious. Nor does this increase appear to be matched in other source types, since "-five" is still common in news, journals, and other results, including recently published ones (though we lack a means of getting solid satistical numbers on them; no one's made a large corpus of English that can be queried in this way except from book materials).

Questions like this should continue to be handled on a case-by-case basis of whether there is sufficiently consistent use of a capital letter in a largely majority of RS to warrant a divergence from the MOS:CAPS lowercase default. There's simply nothing special going on with titles: styles differ in the real world, we have a default style (like all major publishers do), and a divergence from it in a particular case should only be made because in that specific instance nearly all independent sources agree on that divergence. That's the general MoS treatment of everything, not just capitalization.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  07:32, 4 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]