Wikipedia:Identifying and using style guides: Difference between revisions

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{{redirect|WP:STYLEGUIDES|Wikipedia's own internal style guide|Wikipedia:Manual of Style}}

{{Essay |interprets=[[Wikipedia:Reliable sources]], [[Wikipedia:Manual of Style]], and [[manuals of style]] in general |cat=Wikipedia essays and information pages about the Manual of Style‎ |sc1=WP:STYLEGUIDES |sc2=WP:STYLERS|sc3=WP:RSSTYLE|sc4=WP:IUSG}}

{{Nutshell|Not all style guides are created equal; Wikipedia's Manual of Style is only based on a few of them, aside from particular topical details. Use of them as sources in our articles must follow [[WP:PSTS]] policy.}}

This essayadvice page examines the use of externally published [[Style manual|style guide]]s for English writing, both as informative of our own internal [[Wikipedia:Manual of Style]] (MoS), and as [[Wikipedia:Identifying reliable sources|reliable sources]] cited in our articles on English usage.

Remember that Wikipedia has and uses its own [[House style (disambiguation)|house style]]; do not impose styles that don't comply with it just because a divergent style can be found in an external stylebook.

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The style manuals in English that have the strongest effect on general public writing (in the kinds of secondary sources Wikipedia cares about) – and which most directly inform the [[Wikipedia:Consensus|consensus]] behind our MoS – are those for mainstream book publishing. Those of journalism also influence less formal usage (e.g. news reporting, marketing, and business style), but very little from them directly affects Wikipedia style, because it's a markedly different kind of writing. Most discipline-specific academic style manuals are focused on citation formats and the preparation of papers for publication in [[Academic journals|journals]]; we draw on them only for technical material. Government and legal manuals have little impact outside their fields; like academic manuals, they provide little to Wikipedia aside from some terminology and citation formatting.

{{em|As sources for use in our articles}}, care must be taken to use style guides within the bounds of Wikipedia's [[Wikipedia:No original research#Primary, secondary and tertiary sources|policy on primary, secondary, and tertiary sources]], with particular regard to the reputability of the publisher and expertise and background (thus potential biases) of the author(s),. and anDraw eyea to thesharp distinction between presenting the real-world consensus on a language matter versus advocating a subjective "rule". Most of these works are a mixture of sourcing types, but only {{em|secondary}} material from them can be used in our articles for claims that provide [[Wikipedia:No original research#AEIS|analysis, evaluation, interpretation, or synthesis]] ("AEIS").

== The "big four", plus one ==

The four most frequently used style guides for English are also those that are the main bases of our own MoS. These are ''[[The Chicago Manual of Style]]'' (often called ''Chicago'' or ''CMoS'') and ''[[Garner's Modern English Usage]]'', for American and to some extent Canadian English; and ''[[New Hart's Rules]]'' and ''[[Fowler's Dictionary of Modern English Usage]]'' for British English, and Commonwealth English more broadly. They are not necessarily the most factually correct on all [[Linguistics|linguistic]] matters they address, but they are by far the best-selling and thus the most influential on usage.

These are the style guides with the most direct impact on formal written English. ''Chicago'' and ''New Hart's'' are the primary style guides of non-fiction book publishers in North America and the Commonwealth, respectively, and also have a significant impact on journals. Well-educated people who write much will often have a copy of one or the other (though not always a current edition). ''Garner's'' and ''Fowler's'' are both usage dictionaries (like ''New Oxford Dictionary for Writers and Editors'', often packaged with ''New Hart's'' in a single volume, ''New Oxford Style Manual''), and are popular with well-read everyday people as well as professional writers/editors. Cambridge University Press puts one out too, but ''The Cambridge Guide to English Usage'' dates to 2004, is rarely cited, and is primarily for [[English as a second language|ESL]] learners.

Wikipedia's Manual of Style also relies heavily on ''[[Scientific Style and Format]]'' for medical, science, and other technical topics; e.g., it's where most of our advice on units of measure comes from. This is put together by a multi-disciplinary body of science writers from all over the [[anglosphere]]. It was formerly published in the UK, and leaned British for basic typographical matters, but the last few editions have been published in the US by the University of Chicago Press, and been normalized to an extent to ''Chicago'' style on such matters, without affecting the technical advice.

For citations in articles: Highly reputable, organizationally published style guides, like ''Chicago'' and ''New Hart's / Oxford'', are a mixture of [[Wikipedia:No original research#Primary, secondary and tertiary sources|primary, secondary, and tertiary sourcing]]. They are often explicit that they are offering an opinion which may conflict with other style guides and which is not based on generally accepted norms, but attempting to establish one; this is primary. In other cases, they explicitly defer to other named sources' consensus on a matter; this is secondary. When they simply aggregate and repeat what almost all style writers agree on (e.g., start a sentence with a capital letter absent some special reason not to like a trademark that starts with a digit), then they are high-quality tertiary sources. ''Scientific Style and Format'' is mostly tertiary, and generally provides consistent advice with that of more discipline-specific manuals from professional bodies in chemistry, medicine, and other scientific fields {{crossref|printworthy=y|(see [[#Topical academic style guides|below]])}}.

== Government manuals ==

Style guides issued by government agencies/ministries are usually specific to that particular legal entity. There are exceptions, intended to normalize style across an entire government, with highly variable success rates; examples include the ''[[US Government Printing Office]] Style Manual'' (''GPO Manual'' for short, on which most American government department manuals are actually closely based); the UK ''Guidance for Governmental Digital Publishing and Services'' (for British government websites; too new to assess); and the Australian government's ''Style Manual for Authors, Editors and Printers'' (last updated in 2002 and widely ignored). There are also some [[International English|international or world English]] manuals for specific organizational purposes, e.g. UN directorates.

Governmental style guides determine (or attempt to determine) [[wikt:bureaucratese|bureacratesebureaucratese/governmentese/militarese]] – regulatory language. They also exert some effects on national legal style (a field with its own manuals), and business writing to an extent (which also draws heavily on journalism/marketing style, of course). And that's about it. No English class is going to recommend the ''GPO Style Manual'' to its students, for example; nor are these works relied upon by book, news, or academic publishers, except for limited, specialized purposes. Governmentese is a quirky style, full of excessive capitalization and a hatred of hyphens, commas, and much other punctuation.

English has no global or national language authority; there is no equivalent of the French language's [[Académie française]]. Government manuals have no authority to dictate style to non-governmental writers, including Wikipedia. We do borrow from national legal style manuals their citation formats for legal cases, but very little else.

Government style guides should always be treated as primary sources; their sole purpose is to "lay down the law", advocating a strong stance about the writing under their authority (e.g,. that of government workers, or those submitting government paperwork).

== News stylebooks ==

Wikipedia is not written in [[news style]], as a matter of [[Wikipedia:What Wikipedia is not#Wikipedia is not a newspaper|policy]]. Journalistic writing uses many conventions not appropriate for scholarly books (which is what an encyclopedia is, even if you move it online). Our MoS does derive a handful of things from journalism manuals, simply because they are not covered in academic ones; some examples include how to write about the transgendered, and which US cities are well-known enough to not need to be identified by state unless ambiguous. MoS does not follow journalistic punctuation, capitalization, or [[Headlinese|extreme brevity]] practices, and eschews [[Journalese|bombastic and unusual wording]] common in low-end journalism, sportswriting, and entertainment coverage.{{efn|name=titlepreps|One distinction between Wikipedia style and that of many news and academic publishers is the "[[Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Titles#Capital letters#5LETTER|five-letter rule]]": in titles of published works, capitalize a preposition of five letters or longer. Journalism style tends toward four or even three, while academic style most often lower-cases all prepositions, even long ones like ''alongside''. It is one of the only ideas that Wikipedia's MoS has pulled from university textbook style guides, a "split the difference" approach that produces a happy medium for most readers and editors.<p>This is just one example. Another is that Wikipedia uses "[[Wikipedia:Manual of Style#Punctuation inside or outside|logical quotation]]", adopted from textual criticism, linguistics, philosophy, computer science, and other technical writing. Most academic and news writing follows the less precise punctation conventions typical of publishers in the country of publication, but consensus has decided this is [[Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/FAQ|not the best approach]] for Wikipedia, a work that relies on quotation precision.</p><p>Two sorts of things that Wikipedia has adopted from journalism stylebooks are how to write about the transgendered, and which US cities are well-known enough to not need to be identified by state unless ambiguous.</p>}} But MoS does not follow journalistic punctuation, capitalization, or [[Headlinese|extreme brevity]] practices, and eschews [[Journalese|bombastic and unusual wording]] common in low-end journalism, sportswriting, and entertainment coverage. Our encyclopedia articles' [[Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Lead section|lead sections]] have little in common with journalistic "[[lede]]s". Even the [[Inverted pyramid (journalism)|inverted pyramid]] article structure of journalism is typically only found at Wikipedia in simple articles; for more complex topics, our pages are arranged more like an academic paper, with a number of subtopical sections, especially if [[Wikipedia:Summary style|summary style]] is employed.

In newswriting, the most influential manual, by both number of compliant publishers and number of news readers, is the ''[[Associated Press Stylebook]]'' (''AP''), used by the majority of the US press (though several papers, including ''The New York Times'', put out their own widely divergent style guides). The UK/Commonwealth press have no equivalent "monolithic" stylebook; each publisher makes up its own, or choseschooses to follow one of the major papers' (''The Economist'', ''The Guardian'', ''The Times'' of London, and ''BBC News'' appear to be the most influential; they're all inconsistent with each other on many points, but converge on an overall British news style). The ''UPI Stylebook'' and the house-style one for ''Reuters'' (both international newswires) diverge very little from ''AP''.

News style guides are mostly tertiary; the bulk of their content is in the form of usage dictionaries built up from the experience and input of many professional news editors. They can sometimes be primary, however, when making "do/don't write it this way" advice that conflicts with other style guides even in the same field. It's just organizational opinion – a stance – in that case.

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When working on articles, it is important to remember that [[Wikipedia:What Wikipedia is not#Wikipedia is not a manual, guidebook, textbook, or scientific journal|Wikipedia is not a journal]] and must not be written like one, but for a general audience. As with ''Chicago'' and ''Hart's'', these style guides vary from primary through tertiary in source type. They are primary sources for their organization-specific citation styles, but often tertiary for general and field-specific writing advice, being based on the norms of journal editors as expressed in journal- or publisher-specific stylesheets.

A related teritiary source is an expert-compiled [[encyclopedic dictionary]] for a particular field, often scientific. While these mostly consist of highly compressed encyclopedic entries, they may offer reliable style advice on particular things, such as the proper capitalization of a symbol for a unit of measure, how to abbreviate "subspecies" in zoology versus botany, etc.

== For Englishes around the [[anglosphere]] ==

Canada's style is in flux, even aside from being a commingling of British and American influences plus Canadian innovations. There are several competing style guides, like ''The Canadian Style'' (which is old) and ''Editing Canadian English'', but they're not published very frequently, and they contradict each other a lot. One "Canadian" style guide, ''A Canadian Writer's Reference'' (2016), intended as a classroom manual, is just a tweaked American one, by an American author, put out with a new cover; it is not a reliable sourcessource on Canadian norms. The ''Canadian Press Stylebook'' pretty closely follows ''AP'', except on various Briticisms used commonly in Canada (''-our'', ''-re'', etc.). ''[[The Gregg Reference Manual]]'', for business writing, also exists in a Canadian edition (2014), but is American-authored.

The Australian government style guide, while intended for public not just governmental use, is generally excoriated; some of its recommendations have caused minor political disputes, and even "most public servants ignore it".<ref>{{cite web |url= https://contentgroup.com.au/2016/05/australian-government-style-guide/ |title=The document the Australian government hasn’t updated in 14 years |author=<!--Staff writers; no individual by-line.--> |work=ContentGroup.com.au |date=2 May 2016 |publisher=Content Group |___location=Canberra}}</ref> A new edition has been in the planning stages for years, but even if it came out tomorrow, it would be too soon for it to have any effect on Australian usage any time soon, much less on Wikipedia. The Cambridge book has an Australian edition, ''The Cambridge Guide to Australian English Usage''; it is already over a decade old, and is almost word-for-word identical to the UK edition, aside from a few .au colloquialism tweaks.

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=== Grammars ===

Finally, there are {{em|grammars}} of English,{{efn|In this sense, "a grammar" means 'a published study of grammar; a grammar book'.}} which sometimes cover a few style matters, but they're [[Linguistic description|descriptive]] works – about everyday usage for learners, or in serious [[linguistics]] terminology (depending on the publication in question) – not [[Prescriptive grammar|prescriptive]] style manuals. Our MoS generally does not deal with grammatical matters, strictly speaking. Wikipedia trusts that our editors already [[Wikipedia:Competence is required|have that under their belt]].

High-quality grammars of English are, however, very good sources for use in articles on the English language. They are mostly secondary and to an extent tertiary sources, written by actual language experts. They should take precedence over individual monographs and other prescriptive matter. For example, no amount of punditry against split infinitives and sentence-terminating prepositions can evade the well-studied linguistic fact that there are features of the language; their deployment or condemnation is primarily a matter of [[Register (sociolinguistics)|register of use]], not of "correctness".

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== Tone about tone – dictating what's "right" is wrong ==

MoS is written to provide advice on what to {{em|do}} when writing articles here (and sometimes why), without editorializing on propriety or legitimacy. We always keep our broad readership in mind – surely the most general audience in human history, in an era of unprecedented increase in (and reliance upon) [[Wikipedia:Manual of Style#Opportunities for commonality|mutual intelligibility]] across the [[anglosphere]]. Please keep thisthese things in mind if you work on improving the Wikipedia Manual of Style.

Our articles, like our MoS, should steer well clear of subjective pronouncements about what is "proper", "incorrect", "standard",{{efn|There is no official body for issuing "standards" about the English language. Some reliable sources on English use the term ''standard'' in a special sense. The academic concept of ''[[standard English]]es'' refers to the majority dialects {{em|spoken}} within anglophone countries. A standard English is an estimation of usage acceptability within a population and does not imply the existence of a ''standard'' in the sense of published specifications being issued. When referring to a standard English in an article, please link to [[Standard English]] at first occurrence so that readers are not mislead.}} etc. – even when some of our sources wander into that territory. Beware also claims about "American English", "British English", etc. made by style guide authors who are not linguists (e.g., ''Garner's Modern English Usage'', though quite comprehensive, is written by an attorney, and many others are written by news editors, teachers, and other users of – not scholars of – language). Most linguists do not agree with the idea that orthography (spelling, punctuation, etc.) is a matter of dialect (nationwide or otherwise); rather, it is a matter of various publishing-industry industries' standards – i.e., of commerce.

In a few cases, editors with a bee in their bonnet about the "legitimacy" or "wrongness" of some particular style nit-pick (especially along nationalistic lines) have been [[Wikipedia:Banning policy#Topic ban|topic-banned]] from editing about that peccadillo, or even banned from MoS-related discussion as a whole, especially if their non-neutral [[Wikipedia:What Wikipedia is not#Wikipedia is not a soapbox or means of promotion|advocacy]] starts affecting article content. Avoid [[Wikipedia:Disruptive editing|disruptive editing]] about style, especially [[Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Article titles and capitalisation#All parties reminded|personalization of style or article-titles disputes]]. [[Wikipedia:Arbitration Committee/Discretionary sanctions|Discretionary sanctions]] have been authorized to deal with MoS-related disruption: [[Wikipedia:Administrators|admins]] have leeway to unilaterally issue editor or page restrictions.

== Notes and references ==

{{notelist}}

== References ==

{{reflist}}

== See also ==

* [[Wikipedia:Verifiability]] (policy;: the information in our articles must be sourceable and usually already sourc{{em|ed}})

* [[Wikipedia:No original research]] (policy;: includes misuse of sources, especially primary ones)

* [[Wikipedia:Citing sources]] (guideline: we accept lots of citation formats; don't edit-war over them)

* [[Wikipedia:Identifying reliable sources]] (guideline: author and publisher reputability matter)

* [[Wikipedia:Identifying and using independent sources]] (essay;: conflicts of interest matter)

* [[Wikipedia:Identifying and using primary sources]] (essay;: includes style guides that are prescriptive)

* [[Wikipedia:Identifying and using tertiary sources]] (essay;: includes much that is published in style guides)

* [[Wikipedia:Dictionaries as sources]] (essay;: includes usage dictionaries and style guides that contain them)

* [[Wikipedia:SpecializedCommon-style fallacy]] (essay;: avoidjust imposingbecause strangebloggers stylisticor quirksentertainment fromjournalists field-specificdo something doesn't mean we writingdo)

* [[Wikipedia:Specialized-style fallacy]] (essay: avoid imposing strange stylistic quirks from field-specific writing)

* [[Wikipedia:Tertiary-source fallacy]] (essay: dictionaries do not magically trump other sources, policy, and reasoning)

* [[Wikipedia:You are probably not a lexicologist or a lexicographer]] (essay: opinions about word usage do not trump reliable sources on language)

{{Wikipedia essays}}
[[Category:Wikipedia essays onabout reliable sources‎]]