User:Paraphrasis/DSG

The Case for a Democratic Style Guide (Work in Progress)
This essay is a work in progress.

Despite being written by panoply of people, both amateur and professional, Wikipedia has done an excellent job of achieving and maintaining it's status as a publication on par with professional print Encyclopedias. Not only does WP have a strong culture of NPOV, but also a well-fleshed style guide. The style guide serves both Wikipedia and its users well. Wikipedia increases its professional sheen and status, and it's readers and editors learn style patterns that improve the quality of their writing in other spheres.

But the world, and the English language, is ever-changing. New movements, concepts, and words are introduced, and old ones take on new meanings. Often these changes are trivial and uncontroversial. But sometimes these changes represent a flash-point of a larger cultural battle between social groups. For example, take the 2017 blog post by the Associated Press: [//blog.ap.org/behind-the-news/how-to-describe-extremists-who-rallied-in-charlottesville "How to describe extremists who rallied in Charlottesville"]. The Associated Press is famous for its own style guide [//www.apstylebook.com/ The AP Style Book], the gold standard used by professional journalists. While their guide is usually authoritative, their 2017 post is not so much a guideline for use as it is a warning to tread carefully. It lists the following terms:


 * antifa
 * alt-right
 * "alt-left"
 * racism
 * neo-Nazism
 * white nationalism
 * white separatism
 * white supremacy

Wikipedia also has the Manual of Style.

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Frequently pages about topics that fall into this category are protected so that only extended confirmed users and administrators can edit it.