Wikipedia:Identifying and using style guides: Difference between revisions
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SMcCandlish (talk | contribs) m tpyo |
SMcCandlish (talk | contribs) m Bad English; I meant "thems done be", not "they be". [sigh] |
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Innumerable organizations produce a "house style" guide for internal use. These are not reliable sources for English usage, and are just [[Wikipedia:No original research#Primary, secondary and tertiary sources|primary sources]] for what that entity's own subjective preferences are for its internal memos and external marketing. Be careful when doing style research; it is easy to mistake something like the "University of Foobar Style Guide" for a work intended as public advice when it is really nothing but the opinion of the head of the school's marketing department for how to style university brochures and webpages for [[corporate identity]] purposes. Fairly often, you can even find conflicting style guides from different departments at the same legal entity.
A similar case is the submission requirements style sheets of individual journals and particular journal publishers. These reflect a single company or organization's viewpoint (or simply expediently made decisions), not an industry- or discipline-wide norm. They, too, are primary sources. They may be useful for providing (attributed) quotable definitions of particular terms to compare with other definitions in articles on punctuation and other usage matters.
{{anchor|OR|NOR}}For determining what MoS should advise, such "house organs" {{em|are}} sometimes useful, but only in the aggregate. E.g., if a search on <code>Canadian spelling theatre OR theatre</code> shows that 17 of the top 20 results in Canadian institutional house stylesheets exclusively prefer ''theatre'', two permit ''theater'' for movie houses only, one has no preference, and zero prefer ''theater'' in general, then this probably tells us something about Canadian usage, while the result from the University of Toronto's arts department, taken in isolation, tells us nothing but what that department likes. This sort of [[Wikipedia:No original research|original research]] (analysis by Wikipedians themselves) is not permissible in articles, but is a regular part of internal Wikipedia deliberation on talk pages (e.g., it is how we arrive at an evaluation of author and publisher reputability and thus source reliability; how we decide how to summarize multiple sources in encyclopedically compressed wording for our readers; how we decide the best way to write about transgender biography subjects; whether a novel scientific idea is [[Wikipedia:Fringe theories|fringey]]; etc.).
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