User:Herostratus/Cquote RfC sandbox

Cquote is sometimes used in articles, which its documentation prohibits. Wikipedia functions best when documentation and practice agree. What should we do here?
 * Change the practice by preventing Cquote from being used in articles
 * Change the documentation by removing the prohibition against using Cquote

Background and details
This is Quote, which is used for about 90% of block quotes and which would replace the remaining 10% which use Cquote: "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Sit amet porttitor eget dolor morbi. Scelerisque mauris pellentesque pulvinar pellentesque habitant morbi tristique senectus."

And this is Cquote, which is used for about 10% of block quotes: Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Sit amet porttitor eget dolor morbi. Scelerisque mauris pellentesque pulvinar pellentesque habitant morbi tristique senectus.

"Preventing use in articles" would entail recasting Cquote as just a call to Quote when used in articles. (Cquote is also sometimes used by the Signpost, on user pages, etc; these non-article uses will not be disturbed.) Or some similar solution.

"Changing the documentation" means removing the phrase "(and especially avoid decorative quotation marks in normal use, such as those provided by the Cquote template)" from the Manual of Style (it is in the third sentence of WP:BLOCKQUOTE), and removing "This template should not be used for block quotations in article text" from the Cquote documentation itself; or something very similar to this. Thus, Cquote is neither encouraged nor discouraged; it just isn't mentioned on the MOS at all. (Editors can also advocate for an explicit mention of Cquote as a valid alternative quote template, if they want.)


 * Previous discussions
 * 2019: Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Archive 214
 * 2016: Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Archive 184, a large RfC (152,000 bytes) with many participants covering much ground
 * 2015: Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Archive 163
 * 2012: Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Archive 127#Abuse of Cquote in mainspace
 * 2011: Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Archive 126
 * 2010: Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Archive 115
 * 2009: Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Archive 108
 * 2008: Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Archive 97#Using Cquote rather than just blockquote>
 * 2007: Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Archive 92
 * 2007: Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Archive 69
 * 2006: Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Archive 60


 * Nominations of Template:Cquote for deletion: 2006, 2008, 2011


 * Template:Cquote and its archives and Template:Quote] and its archives

These are as of the end of 2019, and rounded to thousands.
 * Usage statistics
 * 149,000 articles use Quote, or its identical manifestations or redirects Blockquote, "...", Quotation, or ".
 * 17,000 articles use Cquote; or its identical manifestations or redirects Rquote or Pull quote.
 * (For what it's worth, Quote box is used in about 10,000 articles. Quote box puts the quote in a colored box with a line around it. It's also prescribed in the MOS ("Block quotations using a colored background are also discouraged") but its not intended to part of this RfC.

We are needing a decision one way or the other.
 * Appeal to the closer

If head count and strength of argument are about equal, the usual close is "No consensus, retain existing state", but this is not what's needed here, since the existing state is simply not acceptable: it puts use and rule in conflict, has been a running sore for ten years, has consumed hundreds of man hours, and encourages dysfunctional editor interactions. It's just not OK.

We request, if you are going to close, that you be prepared to use the material here generated to make a final decision one way or the other.

Survey

 * '''Change the documentation, for a number of reasons.
 * Change the documentation on merits of reader experience: Quotation marks are the universal signal to English speakers that the material contained between them is a direct quotation. Quote uses only indentation, familiar to readers of serious texts but not everyone.
 * Change the documentation on grounds of staff development: like it or not, a lot of editors seem to continue to want to present quotations using Cquote. In spite of the MOS's flat-out prohibition, and occasional outbreaks of people "fixing" these "errors", we have over 15,000 articles that use Cquote to present quotations. Generally, rules here are supposed to codify common practice, within reason, rather than . Micromanaging editors by imposing an order to stop using a tool they find useful and superior as they write and present material -- that is, the actual work of the project -- for insufficient reason is not a good way to grow and nurture a group of volunteers.
 * Change the documentation on ground of upholding Wikipedia process. The admonitions not to use Cquote in articles was put into the MOS [xxx here] in 2007 by an editor on his own initiative, after an extremely short discussion ([xxx here]) which if anything told him not to. Nobody noticed, or cared enough to roll it back, or whatever; it happens. So that editor "got away" with making this new rule. As you all know, once a rule is put in place (however it's done), it's very hard to get the supermajority necessary to remove it -- it's a weakness of the Wikipedia that if you can sneak something it and get away with it for a while then you have the whip hand. Exploiting this weakness is not usually looked on kindly and is not how rules in the Wikipedia are supposed to be made. I don't want to reward or valorize this sort of thing and I hope you don't either.
 * Change the documentation on merits of the 'aesthetics: There's no need to present the reader with a wall of text. Section breaks help some, and images break up the layout, but sometimes you don't have these in your toolbox. Cquote (and it sidebar version Rquote can help with this.
 * Change the documentation on merits of consistency across platforms: On our mobile version, quotations render with large pastel quotation marks, as Cquote does on the non-mobile version. It seems that making quotations look similar on both devices might be a good thing (not sure if this matters; probably a minor point anyway).
 * Wishing to neuter Cquote on ground that "I think it's ugly and I don't want it our encyclopedia" is am entirely valid reason by the way. It's just that you're swimming uphill against all these other reasons.