Talk:Eduard von Martens

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It seems a bit of a shame to be having to go over this, but here goes... The Manual of Style is a series of guidelines which suggest how Wikipedia articles should be formatted. Its section on text formatting states explicitly that there will be exceptions, and that common sense must be used in applying it, and consensus sought. The section being used by Snek01 to justify his edits explicitly applies only to prose, which the bibliography on this article is clearly not. It quotes the example that tables may need to use smaller font sizes to be accommodated on the page/screen. The situation here is patently analogous, and common sense dictates that a similar approach should be used. Having the entire bibliography in the normal font size is, to my eye, staggeringly ugly, and entirely unnecessary. This seems like the sort of situation in which dropping the font size (by the very method advocated by the Manual of Style) is most useful. Other than rigid adherence to a misunderstood conception of the MoS, I have not seen any compelling reason not to use smaller type, and I do not accept that the MoS advocates it. Somewhat unrelatedly, I would also suggest that wikilinks should not be present in the titles in the bibliography, and that the whole list needs to be properly referenced. At the moment, any editor would be justified in removing it all as unverifiable. --Stemonitis (talk) 11:35, 2 June 2011 (UTC)