User:Tony1/Monthly updates of styleguide and policy changes/April 2008

Manual of Style (main page)
Titles. Clarification that common nouns denoting deities or religious figures are not capitalized.

Acronyms and abbreviations. The terms "abbreviation", "acronym" and "initialism" were clarified.

Quotation marks. Clarification that (block-quoted) multiparagraph quotations "must be precise and exactly as in the source. The source should be cited clearly and precisely to enable readers to find the text that supports the article content in question." Instead of HTML tags, quotation or quote can be used to render block quotes.

SI symbols and unit abbreviations. This was added:
 * "A lowercase s is the SI for seconds; thus, kgs means "kilogram-seconds"."

SI symbols and unit abbreviations. This was added:
 * "Exponentiation is indicated using a superscript, an; do not use a caret, a^n" and "Do not use E notation".

Disputes over people's proper names. The previous statement:
 * "Use terminology that subjects use for themselves (self-identification) whenever this is possible"

was replaced with:
 * "Disputes over the proper name of a person or group are addressed by policies such as Verifiability, Neutral point of view, and Naming conventions where the name appears in an article name. When there is no dispute, use terms that a person uses for himself or herself, or terms that a group most commonly uses for itself.

Alignment of images. The last four words were added to the statement:
 * "Right-alignment is preferred to left- or center-alignment for the lead image."

An exception was added:
 * "Wherever possible, images of faces should be placed so that the face or eyes look toward the text, because the reader's eye will tend to follow their direction."

This was added:
 * Where the lead image is a portrait with the face looking to the reader's right, it should be left-aligned, looking into the text of the article. Where this is the lead image, it may be appropriate to move the Table of Contents to the right by using ."

Pronunciation. The last three words were added:
 * "For ease of understanding across dialects, fairly broad IPA transcriptions are usually provided for English pronunciations."

This sentence was added:
 * "For English pronunciations, pronunciation respellings may be used in addition to the IPA."

Manual of Style (dates and numbers)
Decade abbreviations. Two-digit abbreviations for decades may have a preceding apostrophe only in reference to a social era or cultural phenomenon as a stock phrase that roughly corresponds to or defines a decade (the Roaring '20s, the Gay '90s), or where there is a notable connection between the period and the immediate topic (a sense of social justice informed by '60s counterculture, but grew up in 1960s Boston, moving to Dallas in 1971). [This is now inconsistent with the main page of the MoS.]

Units of measurement. A new section was inserted:
 * "Use terminology and symbols commonly employed in the current literature for that subject and level of technicality. When in doubt, use the units of measure, prefixes, unit symbols, number notation, and methods of disambiguation most often employed in reliable periodicals directed to a similar readership.

This was marked with a dispute tag and has been the subject of an edit war and page protection.

Units of measurement. The recommendation to use "sq" and "cu" with US-unit abbreviations was removed; now superscript exponents may be used in that system.

Manual of Style (disambiguation pages)
The piping of disambiguation pages. Clarification: piping may be used to add italics to the part of an article name inside parenthetical clarifiers (for instance Neo (The Matrix) ); until now the guideline only allowed italics and quotation marks for the part outside the parentheses.

Featured article candidate instructions
The third bullet was added to the instructions (underlined here):
 * "A nomination will be removed from the list and archived if, in the judgment of the director or his delegate:
 * actionable objections have not been resolved; or
 * consensus for promotion has not been reached; or
 * insufficient information has been provided by reviewers to judge whether the criteria have been met ."

Featured portal criteria
The following sentence was added to the Featured portal criteria:
 * "It should include links to other Wikimedia Foundation projects when applicable. Portals that focus on a specific group of life-forms (other than humans) should contain a link to Wikispecies project."

Non-free content
The phrase that was removed from Non-free content Criterion 8 last month (underlined here) was reinstated and is currently under discussion:
 * "Significance.' Non-free content is used only if its presence would significantly increase readers' understanding of the topic, and its omission would be detrimental to that understanding.