The TV IV:Proposals/Writing Style

Use this article to raise issues regarding writing style in titles or articles

Comments

1. Rules on capitalisation? Should the latest episode of Rome be "An Owl in a Thornbush" or "An Owl In A Thornbush". I prefer the former, but I've seen quite a bit of the latter around. This should probably be set in stone in a style guide for this site. (unless it already is, and I'm blind and didn't see it). Coolbutuseless 07:33, 12 Sep 2005 (PDT)
   1. A style guide is definitely something we need. I suspect what we'll have to do it create both and redirect. --CygnusTM 09:44, 12 Sep 2005 (PDT)
   2. Create a page for the Style Guide and I'll start filling in some broad strokes. (Not sure on how this whole wiki is laid out, so I don't want to create it in the wrong place). --Coolbutuseless 21:20, 12 Sep 2005 (EDT)
   3. The current edits by myself and Ryvius on Rome/Season_One are typical of the type of thing that a style guide will hopefully sort out. I don't believe that prepositions should be capitalized. "Stealing from Saturn" looks nicer than "Stealing From Saturn". Depending on which style you follow, both are acceptable. Maybe the rule Capitalize Everything will save confusion and make things easier for everyone. A quick look at [1] shows that the rules quickly become obtuse for everyone - e.g. "up" is lowercased as a preposition, but uppercased if it's a particle. I'm not really a style or grammar person, I just appreciate having a site-wide consistency to how things are named </anal retentiveness> --Coolbutuseless 00:43, 13 Sep 2005 (EDT)
2. Similarly stuff like "-ise" and "-ize" endings etc. Majorly pedantic I know, but the stuff of which flamewars are made. Coolbutuseless 07:33, 12 Sep 2005 (PDT)
   1. Use the style of the show's country of origin? Lost would use -ize, while Doctor Who would use -ise. --CygnusTM 09:44, 12 Sep 2005 (PDT)
      1. I don't know if that will work out too well, because, okay, not too many non-British people watch their more obscure shows, but a lot of people, Americans and otherwise, watch things like Doctor Who, Flying Circus, etc. I say we just streamline everything to the American way of writing, since spelling and style aren't limited to whether it's -ize or -ise, and we might end up with irrelevant editing wars. And for the sake of a hypothetical argument, what if some of the more rabid ADTRW posters find out about this site and start going crazy with anime articles? We're going to have a lot of silly animu~~^__^ spelling running around unless there's a clear-cut conformity going on. We already kinda have it that way with the dates. I don't think it's a problem if someone writes an article using different grammar rules, but I think the more or less "official" grammar ruling should be that of American grammar and style. --Wizardryo 19:38, 12 Sep 2005 (EDT)
      2. What about "accept alternate spellings and don't edit a page just to fix the spelling to your alternative"? --Coolbutuseless
         1. Done, I'll stop changing stuff unless it's really bad like capital "The"s --Fezz(Ryvius) 15:54, 13 Sep 2005 (EDT)
      3. That was just a general comment, BTW. I wasn't getting snarky at any particular past edits, just trying to set a mindframe for how to approach future edits. --Coolbutuseless 04:55, 14 Sep 2005 (EDT)
3. Should episode numbers (not production numbers) be of the form "2x03" "203" "s02e03"? Fight it out and get back to me... Personally I prefer the "2x03" format.
   1. Accually I don't believe we should use such abbreviations at all. There is no need to reference episodes this way. --RoToRa 11:09, 13 Sep 2005 (EDT)
   2. In the Episode Template there are sections for previouslynumber and nextnumber, I thought it wanted episode numbers (similar to the Buffy episode pages like Hush). Or is it meant to be production number? (also, any chance previouslynumber can be changed to previousnumber?) --Coolbutuseless 22:03, 13 Sep 2005 (EDT)
      1. It means episode number using the AxBB format. It's one of the few parts on the website where such notation should be used. Also, changing the episode infobox to delete two letters is incredibly minor and unless we start having bots that do that sort of thing for us, that's a lot of time more better spent inputting in actual information. --Wizardryo 23:46, 13 Sep 2005 (EDT)