Wikipedia:Identifying and using style guides: Difference between revisions
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This essay examines the use of externally published style guides, 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 it's own [[House style (disambiguation)|house style]]; do not impose styles that don't comply with it just because that divergent style can be found in an external stylebook.
== How Wikipedia uses style guides ==
The [[Style manual|style guides]] 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.
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