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WP:Update/2/General style guidelines, January 2009 to June 2009

{{collapse top|June 2009}}

  • Wikipedia:Lead section
  • In WP:LEAD#Format of the first sentence, changed "page title" to "article's subject", and added: "The article's subject is usually the same as the page title, but not always. In lists (including outlines, indexes, and glossaries), the subject is generally preceded by the article type (such as "List of"). The article type should not be presented as the subject of the article, only the part after it should. For example, in Outline of Africa, the first sentence of the lead should describe Africa, and present it in bold - not Outline of Africa (the article is not about outlines of Africa, it is presenting an article on Africa in outline form)."
  • At the top of WP:LEAD#Biographies, added "Main article:[sic] Biographies of living persons"
  • Changed WP:LEAD#Citations substantially from the [http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Lead_section&oldid=292973707#Citations May 31] version

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{{collapse top|May 2009}}

  • Wikipedia:Avoid peacock terms
  • Added: "select(ed)"
  • Added section, WP:PEACOCK#Exception for quotations: "Do not impose Wikipedia style guidelines on sources that we cite or quote. It is proper to say, "Music critic Ann Bond wrote that Mozart was a great composer," or "Smith said, 'Senator Jones's acceptance of this contribution is a major scandal.'" Such indirect or direct quotations may be useful in presenting important perspectives, especially on contentious subjects, or in summarizing a widely held view."
  • Wikipedia:External links
  • In WP:EL#Links normally to be avoided, changed [Any site that misleads the reader by use of factually inaccurate material or unverifiable research.] "See Reliable sources for explanations of the terms "factually inaccurate material" or "unverifiable research"." to "except to a limited extent in articles about the viewpoints which such sites are presenting."
  • In a footnote in the same section: changed [a link to a social networking site may be included when it is] "the official website for a business, organization, or person." to "an official website for a business, organization, or person. However, Wikipedia does not provide a comprehensive web directory to every official website, and more than one official website should be listed only when the additional links provide unique content and are not prominently linked from other official websites."
  • Added to same section: "Placing external links on Wikipedia navigation pages such as disambiguation, redirect and category."
  • Added footnote to same section and also to WP:EL#Sites requiring registration: "This guideline does not restrict linking to websites that are being used as sources to provide content in articles."
  • In WP:EL#Linking to user-submitted video sites, changed "Most YouTube videos containing copyrighted material (outside of the official YouTube channels of organizations and entertainment/news media companies) do not have permission of the copyright owners." to "Many YouTube videos of newscasts, shows or other content of interest to Wikipedia visitors are copyright violations."
  • Wikipedia:Lead section
  • Added to WP:LEAD#First sentence: [When the page title is used as the subject of the first sentence, it may appear in a slightly different form, and it may include variations,] "including synonyms".
  • Added to same section: [If the page is a list, do not introduce the list as "This is a list of X"] "or "This list of Xs..."."
  • In WP:LEAD#Alternative names, changed "Inclusion of non-English names should be seen as a desirable part of maximizing information available to the reader." to "however, the editor needs to balance the desire to maximize making information available to the reader with the need to maintain readability of the lead."
  • Expanded WP:LEAD#Citations
  • Wikipedia:Linking
  • Page protection was removed, and the page was substantially rewritten ([http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Linking&oldid=287005843 last version in April], [http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Linking&oldid=292805720 last version in May]).

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{{collapse top|April 2009}}

  • Wikipedia:Layout
  • In WP:LAYOUT#"See also" section, after "A reasonable number of relevant links that would be in the body of a hypothetical "perfect article" are suitable to add to the "See also" appendix of a less developed one.": removed the footnote, "This of course refers only to links related to the topic, not links that are incidental, e.g. linking to a jargon word in a sentence."
  • Added to WP:LAYOUT#Images: "Please see WP:IG for further information on the use of galleries."

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{{collapse top|March 2009}}

  • Wikipedia:Avoid peacock terms
  • Added: "[it is] generally [unhelpful to prefix a fact or development with comments like] ... [“interestingly”, “ironically”, “surprisingly”,] "the researchers were shocked to find" or ..."
  • Wikipedia:Manual of Style (capital letters)
  • Added to lead section: "[Capital letters are sometimes a matter of regional differences;] for example, British writers and editors are more inclined to use them than their North American counterparts."
  • Some additional explanation added to WP:MOSCAPS#Titles
  • Wikipedia:Manual of Style (spelling)
  • Added: "tyre - tire: In American and Canadian English, tire is used to refer to 'to fatigue' and the inflated rim of a wheel. In British and other forms of English, tire means 'to fatigue' and tyre is the inflated rim of a wheel."
  • Added: "advise, devise"

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{{collapse top|February 2009}}

  • Wikipedia:Manual of Style
  • Most instances of "etc.", "i.e." and "e.g." were italicized.
  • Added: "Capitalize the first letter of the first word and any proper nouns in headings, but leave the rest lower case. Thus "Rules and regulations", not "Rules and Regulations"."
  • New section: WP:MOS#Geographical items
  • Added to WP:MOS#Strong national ties to a topic: "This is primarily intended to avoid the (unlikely) case in which an article which will be overwhelmingly read by one nationality has been written in another national dialect. Australians should not stumble over Americanisms in Australian Defence Force; Americans should not find Anglicisms in American Civil War. Using an author's chosen variety of English may also be desirable in a biographical or critical article, especially if the author's writings are quoted in his article; some readers will be disconcerted by the shift between Tolkien's very English prose and another dialect, for example; however, some authors write in a mixture of national dialects. This recommendation should not be used to claim national ownership of certain articles; see WP:OWN."
  • Wikipedia:Writing better articles
  • In WP:BETTER#News style, added: "[news style] prioritizes information, because many people expect to find important material early, and less important information later where interest decreases."
  • Removed: "Moreover, if you find many related fiction stubs, merge them!"

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{{collapse top|January 2009}}

  • Wikipedia:Accessibility
  • In WP:ACCESS#Links, changed "Screen readers [will stop reading the heading title when they encounter a link ...]" to "Some screen readers ..."
  • New proposal, WP:ACCESS#Resolution: "Wikipedia articles should be accessible to readers using devices with small screens, or to readers using monitors with a low resolution. The lowest resolution that it is considered possible to support without adversely affecting other users is 800x600; all articles should look acceptable at this resolution without excessive horizontal scrolling. This is sometimes an issue in articles with multiple images on both sides of the screen; although lower resolutions will tend to stretch paragraphs vertically, moving images apart in that direction, be careful not to add images or other floating content on both sides of the screen simultaneously. Large tables and images can also create problems; sometimes horizontal scrolling is unavoidable, but consider restructuring wide tables to extend vertically rather than horizontally."
  • New heading: WP:ACCESS#Block elements
  • New proposal, WP:ACCESS#Scrolling and collapsible sections: "Scrolling and collapsible sections in tables or other block elements can be useful to save space and conceal at first-sight potentially superfluous information. However, such techniques must be used with caution, as this content can become inaccessible in a number of situations. Printers and screen-readers will both output only the content that is immediately visible on the page, and these structures are more likely to exhibit undesirable behavior on certain browsers. As such, these methods should not be used in the article body. This includes reference lists, image galleries, and image captions; they especially should not be used to conceal 'spoiler' information (see Wikipedia:Spoiler). Collapsible sections are useful in navboxes and infoboxes and are widely used outside the article namespace; in these instances, care should be taken to ensure that the content will still be acessible on devices which do not support JavaScript and/or CSS."
  • New subsection, WP:ACCESS#Infoboxes, containing only a pointer to HTML breaks problem
  • WP:ACCESS#Styles and markup options was changed substantially.
  • Wikipedia:Avoid weasel words
  • Removed from lead section: "The "who?" link is used ..."
  • Added to WP:WEASEL#Examples: "It is rumored that...", "There are rumors that...", "Presumably...", "It turns out that..."
  • Removed from WP:WEASEL#Other problems: "Convoluted syntax. Weasel words require some convoluted syntax to get a point across. "A square has four sides" is a simple sentence; "Squares are widely regarded as having an even number of sides, a number that has been conjectured by experts in the field to be precisely four" wraps the key point in layers of syntactic obfuscation, leaving it to be harvested with difficulty by the reader."
  • Added Avoid speculation to See also links
  • Wikipedia:Citing sources
  • Added to WP:CITE#When to cite sources: "Since per WP:V each fact presented by an article must be concretely verifiable, at the editor's discretion it is possible and appropriate to include as many proper and correct citations as desired to affirm the statements made. However citation is only required as specified in the following list of circumstances. And whether a citation is added in a required context or at an editor's discretion it must be accurate and should comply with the rules set forth in this guideline."
  • Added to WP:CITE#Citation templates and tools: "For a comparison of footnote references using citation templates with references written freehand, see Wikipedia:Citing sources/Example edits for different methods."
  • Removed: "There are (at least) two families of citation templates. The {{tl|Citation}} template is intended to provide citations for many types of sources. The other family has names of the form {{Cite xxx}} (for example, {{tl|Cite book}} and {{tl|Cite web}}). These two families produce different citation styles. For example, the {{Cite xxx}} family separates elements with a full stop (period), while the {{tl|Citation}} template separates elements with a comma. Thus, these two families should not be mixed in the same article."
  • The bullet points in WP:CITE#How to present citations were changed substantially.
  • Added to WP:CITE#Footnote system: "Optionally, one may add the name attribute by using name=name>details of the citation. Thereafter, the same reference may be used multiple times by adding name=name/>."
  • Added to WP:CITE#Shortened footnotes: "For more detailed examples using shortened notes, including the use of links from the short notes to the full references, see Wikipedia:Citing sources/Example edits for different methods."
  • Wikipedia:External links
  • Added to lead section: "[Wikipedia articles may include links to web pages outside Wikipedia,] but must conform to certain formatting restrictions."
  • In WP:EL#Links normally to be avoided, changed "Affiliate or tracking links" to "Affiliate, tracking or referral links"
  • In WP:EL#Advertising and conflicts of interest, shortened "If the link is to a relevant and informative site that should otherwise be included, please consider mentioning it on the talk page and let neutral and independent Wikipedia editors decide whether to add it." to "When in doubt, you may go to the talk page and let another editor decide."
  • Removed "Note that since Wikipedia uses nofollow tags, external links may not alter search engine rankings."
  • Wikipedia:Lead section
  • Added to lead section: "and the notability of the article's subject should be established in the first sentence of the lead"
  • The entire page was substantially edited, with material pulled in from previously transcluded pages.
  • Wikipedia:Manual of Style (capital letters)
  • In WP:MOSCAPS#Mixed or non-capitalization, added link to WP:MSM
  • Added: "Wikipedia does not capitalize the first letter, when, as in these cases, not doing so has become normal English usage. (Beginning article titles lower case requires the {{tl|lowercase}} template or equivalent code.)"
  • Changed "If multiple styles have regular and established use in reliable sources, use the orthography preferred by the individual." to "Editors disagree on how often this should be done; some editors would never do it; some would always follow the personal preference of the subject."

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