Misplaced Pages

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by SMcCandlish (talk | contribs) at 05:27, 5 July 2017 (→MoS: new section). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

A barnstar for you

		The Modest Barnstar
		In recognition of all the work you’ve done lately! 66.87.0.36 (talk) 18:56, 1 April 2012 (UTC)

A barnstar for you!

	The Brilliant Idea Barnstar
	For you cogent contribution to Talk:Tom Eyen on the subject of infoboxes. Edwardx (talk) 11:18, 27 April 2016 (UTC)

Barnstar time!

		The Original Barnstar
		Nice work on the piece on Willie J. Hagan. I caught that in the New Pages queue and found it to be well done. Thanks for your effort! Carrite (talk) 04:30, 20 November 2016 (UTC)

A beer for you!

For work on Mohsen Milani. Thanks. Bob. scope_creep (talk) 12:14, 23 April 2017 (UTC)

MoS

I wrote out a point-by-point response to your MoS meta-thread at WT:MOSCAPS, and ended up edit-conflicting with the archiver bot while doing so. Rather than unarchive it, I've left it there, but you probably would not see it without a pointer to it. The entire thread was actually off-topic for the MOSCAPS talk page anyway, but I think it's important to address what you raised in detail, since we need not go over the same stuff a week later or month later or whatever at WT:MOS. The super-compressed precis is that MoS is intended to be flexible; that doesn't make it vague or wishywashy, just not inflexible. And the community wants it that way. When it gets inflexible, people get angry. There is no support for elevating more style stuff to policy, and there is even some support for reducing our only style policy, WP:AT, back to guideline. There is also no support for eliminating these guidelines and letting topical wikiprojects have free rein; support for wikiprojects even continuing to exist is at an all-time low. There is no such thing as "enforceability" on Misplaced Pages, for anything other that ArbCom rulings and legal matters that WMF imposes on all projects, like copyright law compliance. MoS has only two actual purposes: to help gnomes produce polished content with minimal potential for reader confusion, and forestalling the same tedious style fights between editors on page after page; all other possible functions a style guide could theoretically serve are not ones that our style guide serves or ever will serve. It will never be comprehensive, it will never be required reading, it will never pontificate on what is "true" or "correct", it will never be a list of inflexible mandates, and it will never be a policy. People with contrarian style ideas are indeed a source of strife, but it's a natural and inevitable response we just have to deal with; they either learn WP is not their personal blog and that compromise is required for a global audience, or they pout and leave, or they turn "crusader" and are forcibly ejected – which is all the same as with someone's reaction to any other policy or guideline. And a guideline's talk page is not a vehicle for trying to challenge guideline "validity"; it is for discussing improvements to the guideline. All of these are explicated in some detail in the linked post. You may not agree with all of it, but I think you'll find it well reasoned, and based on experience (I'm the longest-term regular MoS editor who is still active, I think). At very least, I hope it helps produce future discussion that avoids various perennial "I don't like it" and "I wish WP worked differently" stuff, and is more focused on something practical to actually resolve at an guideline talk page.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ≼  05:27, 5 July 2017 (UTC)