Wikipedia:Update/1/General style changes during December 2008


 * WP:Accessibility
 * Added link to MOS:SCROLL
 * Added link to Alternative text for images, and "Images should include alt text that acts as a substitute for the image for blind readers, search-spiders and other non-visual users." [Note that this contradicts WP:MOS, which only "encourages" alt text.]  "This guideline includes alt text for LaTeX-formatted equations in  mode."
 * Changed "The caption should concisely describe any information contained in the image." to "The caption should concisely describe the meaning of the image, the essential information it is trying to convey."


 * WP:Avoid peacock terms
 * Added "impactful", "renowned"


 * WP:Citing sources
 * In WP:CITE, changed "" to " ) characters between the quotation marks should not be used; Wikipedia presents quotations, character for character, exactly as in the original."
 * Added:
 * Allowable changes
 * Though the requirement for minimal change is strict, a few merely typographical elements of the quoted text should normally be altered without comment, to conform to English Wikipedia conventions. Such a practice is universal, in all publishing. Such alterations include these:
 * Styling of dashes (use the style chosen for the article: unspaced em dash or spaced en dash; see Dashes, below).
 * Styling of apostrophes and quotes (they should all be straight, not curly; see Quotation marks, below); such typographical elements as guillemets (« », in quoted French, Portuguese, and other foreign-language material) should be altered to their English-language equivalents (guillemets become standard straight quote marks, for example).
 * Spaces before periods, colons, semicolons, and the like should be removed, since they are merely typographical and are alien to the conventions in use throughout English Wikipedia, and English-language publishing in general.
 * Some text styling (of course the typeface will be automatically made the same as the article's default typeface; but preserve bold, underlining, and italics; see Italics, above).
 * Ellipses should be used whenever parts of a quotation are skipped. Legitimate reasons for omitting parts of quotation include removing extraneous, irrelevant, or parenthetical words or skipping over unintelligible or guttural speech (umm, ahhs, and hmms, for example). Care should be made to not use ellipses to remove context or to selectively quote so as to change the meaning of the quote (as is sometimes seen in advertisements for movies and plays that selectively quote critical reviews to make them appear more favorable).


 * Changed "The ellipsis is represented by ellipsis points, a series of three dots (or sometimes four at the end of a sentence)." to "The ellipsis is represented by ellipsis points: a set of three dots."
 * Changed "Ellipses" to "Ellipsis points (loosely called ellipses)"
 * Added "... no space between an ellipsis and: ...
 * a parenthesis or a bracket, where the ellipsis is on the inside
 * sentence-final punctuation, or a colon, semicolon, or comma (all rare), following the ellipsis"


 * Expanded the WP:MOS subsection
 * Examples added to the WP:MOS subsection
 * Added "A colon should normally have a complete grammatical sentence before it, except sometimes when it introduces items set off in new lines like the very next colon here. Examples:"
 * Added:
 * In very rare cases, a comma may be used where a semicolon would seem to be called for:
 * Accepted: "Life is short, art is long." (citing a brief aphorism; see Ars longa, vita brevis)
 * Accepted: "I have studied it, you have not." (reporting brisk conversation, like this reply of Newton's)


 * Added to WP:MOS: "Some words ending in -ly function as both adverbs and adjectives (a friendly-looking driver, the natives used us friendly and with kindness). Some such dual-purpose words (like early, only, northerly) are not standard -ly adverbs, since they are not formed by addition of -ly to an independent current-English adjective. These need careful treatment: Early flowering plants evolved along with sexual reproduction, but Early-flowering plants risk damage from winter frosts; northerly-situated islands."
 * Added: "Avoid two "sharp break" em dashes in a sentence, since they are readily mistaken for a parenthetic pair."
 * Added, after "A spaced slash may be used": "or rarely when quoting prose, where careful marking of a paragraph break is textually important"
 * Added to WP:MOS: "Within a sentence, other punctuation (such as comma of colon) is used after a formula just as it would be if the text were not a formula."
 * Added to WP:MOS: "or simply use at instead:The population was over 21,000,000 (at December 2008)"
 * Added to WP:MOS: "A hard space (see above) is advisable: ."
 * Added to WP:MOS: "Further, a space—preferably a non-breaking space —always separates the value and temperature symbol (e.g. 35 °C, 62 °F, and 5,000 K."
 * Expanded the WP:MOS subsection
 * Added to WP:MOS: recommendation and discussion of "alt text"
 * Added new section, WP:MOS
 * In WP:MOS, added The MLA Style Manual


 * WP:Manual of Style (capital letters)
 * WP:MOSCAPS changed similarly to WP:MOS
 * Various changes with punctuation and grammar problems (now reverted)


 * WP:Manual of Style (dates and numbers)
 * [No changes; the page has been protected since Nov 20.]


 * WP:Manual of Style (links)
 * Removed from WP:MOSLINK:
 * Links to a subheading on a page are denoted by a # symbol between the page title and the subheading . For example, to link to the "Culture" subsection of the Oman article, type . When naming a piped link, think about what the reader will believe the link is about; in this example, the piped section-link should not be named "Oman", because the reader will think that link goes to the general article on Oman.


 * Added to WP:MOSLINK:
 * Links to a subheading on a page are denoted by a # symbol between the page title and the subheading (see HTML anchor).
 * Section links can also be "piped", e.g.:
 * (Geography of Baden-Württemberg).
 * However this often becomes unwieldy in the main prose, so it may be preferable to create and link to a redirect, e.g.:
 * (Geography of Baden-Württemberg).
 * As of 2008 this points to a section within the main Baden-Württemberg article, but it is quite likely to become a separate article in the future (see also WP:REDIRECT). Also as of 2008 Special:Whatlinkshere provides no way to determine which pages link to which section(s) of a given article, so this also offers a better way to filter incoming links and identify related articles.
 * (Geography of Baden-Württemberg).
 * As of 2008 this points to a section within the main Baden-Württemberg article, but it is quite likely to become a separate article in the future (see also WP:REDIRECT). Also as of 2008 Special:Whatlinkshere provides no way to determine which pages link to which section(s) of a given article, so this also offers a better way to filter incoming links and identify related articles.


 * Many changes to WP:MOSLINK
 * Added to WP:MOSLINK: "(But capitalization does matter for all characters after the first.)"


 * WP:Manual of Style (spelling)
 * Added "routeing", "routing"


 * WP:Manual of Style (writing about fiction)
 * Examples added to WP:WAF; Lord of the Rings removed.


 * WP:Only make links that are relevant to the context
 * Added to WP:CONTEXT: "Similarly, articles generally should not link to disambiguation pages when a page describing the topic in context of the original article is available."
 * Reworded footnote: "It is not necessary to link to geographic features that are familiar worldwide, such as continents and prominent countries."
 * Added to WP:CONTEXT: "Use main and seealso immediately after the header instead [of certain bold links]"


 * WP:Self-references to avoid
 * Minor rewording and link fixes


 * WP:The perfect article
 * Added WP:PERFECT link: Wikipedia:Perfection is not required
 * Added:
 * is accessible (ideally following Web Content Accessibility Guidelines recommendations).
 * is technically sound (with lists marked up as such, foreign-language text labelled with lang or equivalent, etc.)


 * WP:Words to avoid
 * After "WP:AVOID redirects here", changed "You may also be looking for ... Avoid statements that will date quickly" to "You may also be looking for ... Manual of Style (dates and numbers)"
 * Changed several sentences to their own subsections; for instance, the sentence "In particular, words such as fundamentally, essentially, basically, simply, or at heart often imply a preferred viewpoint: the "fundamental nature" of a topic is inherently subjective." was changed to a subsection named: Fundamentally, essentially, basically, simply, at heart, inherently.
 * Added after "Dubious use": "The Huron-Manistee National Forests are actually two national forests combined in 1945 for administration purposes."
 * Previous discussion of naturally reworded as a new subsection, WP:WORDS: "The word "naturally" could be used in either of the above cases as well, and its use should be avoided. However, it is also used when referring to the natural world, and it has a precise technical and qualitative meaning in mathematics. Assertions of naturality in the latter sense may be uncontroversial statements of mathematical consensus, or they may promote a point of view; some judgment is needed to determine which."
 * Changed the name of the WP:WORDS section to WP:WORDS, and moved the "terrorist" subsection to WP:Controversial articles. [See discussion at WT:Controversial articles.]
 * Added to WP:WORDS: "Note however, that the verb to theorize may be appropriate for learned speculation."
 * Added to WP:WORDS: The word controversy is used "often by editors with a strong disposition against the article subject."
 * Fixed link to WP:MOSNUM (WP:Avoid statements that will date quickly is now a redirect.)