Wikipedia:Identifying and using style guides: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 09:33, 9 November 2018

Latest revision as of 11:40, 28 July 2024

(8 intermediate revisions by 6 users not shown)

Line 23:

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.{{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.

Line 93:

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:Common-style fallacy]] (essay: just because bloggers or entertainment journalists do something doesn't mean we do)

* [[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]]