Wikipedia:Identifying and using style guides: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 02:50, 7 July 2018

Revision as of 02:50, 7 July 2018

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== News style ==

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 [[Journalist|bombastic and unusual wording]].{{efn|name=titlepreps|One distinction between Wikipedia style and that of many news and academic publisherpublishers 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 lowercase all prepositions, even long ones like ''alongside''. It is one of the only ideas that Wikipedia's MoS has pulled from university textbook style guide, 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 a work that relies on quotation precision.</p>}} 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 choses to follow one of the major papers' (''The Guardian'', ''The Times'', ''The Economist'', etc.; they're all pretty inconsistent with each other on many points; like ''NYT'' they make a point of it, as a branding mechanism). The ''UPI Stylebook'' and the house-style one for ''Reuters'' (both international newswires) diverge very little from ''AP''.