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October 2023

Two more celebs you kinda look like...

Colin Farrell and The Edge (like 20 years ago). Jweiss11 (talk) 05:10, 1 October 2023 (UTC)

It's a conspiracy! — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 05:11, 1 October 2023 (UTC)

Feedback request: Biographies request for comment

Done

Your feedback is requested at Talk:Julian Assange on a "Biographies" request for comment. Thank you for helping out!
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CfD nomination at Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2023 October 1 § Category:WikiProject X members

Done

– This has been a long time coming.

A category or categories you have created have been nominated for possible deletion, merging, or renaming. A discussion is taking place to decide whether this proposal complies with the categorization guidelines. If you would like to participate in the discussion, you are invited to add your comments at Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2023 October 1 § Category:WikiProject X members on the categories for discussion page. Thank you. Qwerfjkl talk 09:32, 2 October 2023 (UTC)

Commentary on MOS:TV edit

Experienced WP editors know that you are a widely respected editor with a wealth of experience, particularly on matters of style and formatting, and that your sensible good judgement frequently intervenes to resolve disagreements on such matters.

Which is why I am disappointed at the commentary accompanying your recent edit[1].

Your revert was of course entirely reasonably, per BRD. But per the same policy, so was my original edit. According to your own count, I have made over sixty recent edits to MOSTV, of which only two issues have given rise to any challenge, with the remainder (so far) being accepted without challenge as improvements to the original text. This is surely the spirit of BRD, exemplified? On the two challenged matters - applying MOSNUM to a couple of examples within MOSTV, and replacing “summarize” with “describe”, I have of course accepted the “R” within BRD without argument.

Replacing “summarize” with its US English spelling with “describe”, which accords with MOS:COMMONALITY, was in my view a reasonable change, but after reversion is not something that I would seek to contest. MapReader (talk) 16:52, 5 October 2023 (UTC)

On the tone, fair enough; sorry if that came across as forceful or insensitive. But swapping in words with different meanings is a substantive change, and there was a big thread open for some times about not making any more substantive changes without discussion first. The words are not synonymous. A "description" of a plot (as tedious or fast-paced, well-crafted or amateurish, simple or convoluted, etc.) would be primarily a matter of opinion, and something more appropriate for a review. A summary – a term we use frequently, e.g. at WP:SUMMARYSTYLE, WP:COPYRIGHT, etc. – means an abstract or precis, a reduction of original material to a very compact form in written in our own words; not a description. PS: "summarise" would also be fine; whatever better agrees with the rest of the document. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 18:00, 5 October 2023 (UTC)

I agree with User:MapReader here. You should definitely change your tone. I find it shocking someone as respected as you speaks the way you do. Iterresise (talk) 19:40, 18 October 2023 (UTC)

You already have an entire section in which you are making similar vague and no-diff complaints. A) If you have an issue with another editor, you need to be much clearer about what it is is, with particulars and evidence. Otherwise you are just casting vague aspersions. B) You need to stay off my talk page unless you have something constructive to say that actually relates to building an encyclopedia. I'll repeat for the third time: WP is not a social media site for picking fights with strangers on the Internet for entertainment value. And I'll say again for something like the fifth time in one form or another: meeting with disagreement when you propose vague and questionably thought-out changes to policy pages does not mean you are being personally attacked, it just means people disagree with your idea. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 19:48, 18 October 2023 (UTC)

Feedback request: Wikipedia policies and guidelines request for comment

Disregard

– I've already been embedded in that discussion for some time now.

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Latinx

Saw your pings when I got up this morning and went to lay down some protection. Luckily Johnuniq had already picked up my slack. ScottishFinnishRadish (talk) 11:19, 7 October 2023 (UTC)

RfC on the "Airlines and destinations" tables in airport articles

Done

You are invited to join the discussion at Wikipedia:Village pump (policy) § RfC on the "Airlines and destinations" tables in airport articles. I saw that you participated in a discussion on a similar topic. Sunnya343 (talk) 18:11, 8 October 2023 (UTC)

Nomination for deletion of Template:Systemic bias

Template:Systemic bias has been nominated for deletion. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the entry on the Templates for discussion page. Mach61 (talk) 03:18, 9 October 2023 (UTC)

Unsourced BLP claim on user page

Note that BLP applies to user pages as well, you appear to be making an unsourced BLP claim in the context of work you did with Aerosmith. I would like to give you the chance to remove it (I know that BLP requires me to remove it immediately but I am IAR because I think that asking you to remove it is better for the project civility wise) or source it. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 17:57, 10 October 2023 (UTC)

Stating who I've worked with, including a business entity named Aerosmith which like all business entities is made up of some living people (at least until the AIs completely take over), has no BLP implications at all. But you do whatever you want. I don't really care much about jokey content on my user page. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 18:01, 10 October 2023 (UTC)

I think you will understand better after it is removed, not that bit. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 18:12, 10 October 2023 (UTC)

You could try just writing plainly instead of trying to be mystically mysterious. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 18:17, 10 October 2023 (UTC)

I don't really see the point in removing a pseudonym, but I don't particularly object either. The writer probably does actually need to not be a redlink, but the Aerosmith episode isn't likely to rate as content in their article. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 18:19, 10 October 2023 (UTC)

Feedback request: Wikipedia style and naming request for comment

Done

– A lesson in "be careful what you wish for". Think twice about opening a redundant RfC after ignoring the discussion prior to it, in hopes that you'll just somehow magically WP:WIN.

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Greetings

Hello there. I hope it's okay for me to leave a message on your talk page. I just wanted to mention that phrases like "random WP editors" or recommendations to peruse unrelated links might be considered offensive. I hope you understand my perspective. Take care in the meantime. Infinity Knight (talk) 09:43, 16 October 2023 (UTC)

I actually have no idea what you're referring to. I edit hundreds of pages per day. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 10:00, 16 October 2023 (UTC)

Is that so? Would you like me to provide specific examples (diffs) to help jog your memory? It would be appreciated if you could acknowledge the veracity of this information. Infinity Knight (talk) 11:12, 16 October 2023 (UTC)

Despite my clear request to the contrary, you persist in offering links that do not contribute to the discussion. What is the reason for this? Furthermore, you are now engaging in baseless speculations about my motives. Would it be necessary for me to furnish you with links to relevant policies on this matter? Infinity Knight (talk) 13:57, 16 October 2023 (UTC)

Of course diffs of the posts in question would be helpful, and your dancing around pretending it's some kind of imposition for you to provide any comes off as unnecessarily hostile game-playing. Just get to the point, please. I have no idea what discussion or links or speculations you're referring to. No, I don't need links to policies; I've been writting them for 17 years. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 20:04, 16 October 2023 (UTC)

Digging around on my own, I realized this has something to do with the "Contentious labels" discussion at WT:MOSWTW. I have no idea what links you are referring to that you think are unrelated, but there is no policy against posting links that someone doesn't find relevant. There is no issue with the phrase "random WP editors". You are a random WP editor, and so am I; neither of us are in positions of special authority or influence, like ArbCom members. We're just random editors. Your continual erection of "might be considered offensive" language, here and at that other page, is a bad sign; if you want to quote and read policies, start with WP:NOT#SOAPBOX and WP:NOT#BATTLEGROUND, and re-read your apparent favorite, WP:CIVIL. If you think that implying that every random editor who disagrees with you about something is being "offensive", you are being anything but civil. And using borderline obsequious language, like you are doing here, while trying to pick a fight for no reason is WP:FALSECIV and not going to fool anyone. Finally, I'm not engaging in any "baseless speculations about [your] motives"; I'm analyzing the text of the propositions and rationales you are posting, for what effects they are likely to produce if adopted as guideline changes, and making it easier to label people/groups/events as "terrorist[s]" or "racist[s]" is the very probable outcome. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 20:38, 16 October 2023 (UTC)

I also want people to stop using drugs and alcohol . I want help them so that they can move forward with their lives 😊 41.116.50.68 (talk) 18:32, 17 October 2023 (UTC)

Don't we all? But that doesn't seem to relate to this discussion at all. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 19:08, 17 October 2023 (UTC)

🤣 I reckon this chat needs to simmer down a bit. I can kinda see the sense in what you're saying. Infinity Knight (talk) 20:07, 17 October 2023 (UTC)

Sure, but it wasn't really simmering from my point of view. Just because you are meeting with disagreement doesn't mean the other party is angry. If I got actually angry every time I disagreed with someone, editing WP would become rapidly impossible for me. Being met with disagreement and opposition doesn't mean you are being attacked, it just means people disagree with and resist what you proposed. Need to compartementalize. "I am not an idea I came up with, and an idea I came up with is not me." — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 02:53, 21 October 2023 (UTC)

October thanks

Thank you for improving articles in October! - Today, it's a place that inspired me, musings if you have time. My corner for memory and music has today a juxtaposition of what our local church choirs offer. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 13:50, 20 October 2023 (UTC)

Input requested

Resolved

– Don't think any further input from me is needed. This just needs additional source research, a new RfC, and an agreement between two parties to not antagonize each other unnecessarily.

Hello SMcCandlish. Given that you are a template editor, I would appreciate your input in the discussion User talk:Thinker78#Request dated 20 October 2023. Specifically, my request is more geared to your opinion about the use of the {{adminhelp}} template, as I don't know where the admin based their advise on and I think they may not reply. Regards, Thinker78 (talk) 00:51, 21 October 2023 (UTC)

@Thinker78: I tend not to wade into disputes like this without looking at all the background material, so I'll end up addressing more than you asked about. :-) I would bet that where Bbb23 was coming from is that the template is documented for a situation "which requires an administrator to perform a task" (like fix a broken full-protected template or something like that). Raising a concern about another user's behavior is more of a judgment and input question than a task to perform, and ANI is the general venue for that if the behavior doesn't seem to be a momentary flare-up. (And this to me doesn't look like a good ANI report.) At WT:RFC, WhatamIdoing's response to both of you has good advice. For my part, I think M.Bitton was overreacting when it came to their comment being moved (especially in an RfC that does have separate sections for discussion and !votes), but it's not a hill to die on. Their venting seems a bit emotive but doesn't really rise to personal-attack levels. I reviewed the user-talk thread here, and M.Bitton, like WhatamIdoing, is correct that people involved in RfCs shouldn't be closing them (see WP:CLOSE: "Most discussions don't need closure at all, but when they do, any uninvolved editor may close most of them". A common exception is when you've proposed something and no one's buying it, it's fairly customary to WP:SNOWBALL-close your own proposal as having failed to gain consensus.) I have no idea what the "throwing irrelevant jargon at me" stuff was about, so can't really comment on that. Your suggestion "the way to go is making a request at Wikipedia:Closure requests" was the right one, though I'm not certain what it's in response to (e.g. an attempt by another involved party to close the RfC?). But, see below; I think this RfC right now would not close very usefully and needs more imput. Things like "please check WP:DISRUPTSIGNS and try to not ..." tend to be irritating to experienced users, who've already read the material and are apt to feel insulted at being called disruptive. (At the risk of ignorning my own advice, I would suggest a look at WP:FALSECIV; couching what amount to insults in wording that bends over backwards to sound surface-polite can simply come across as infuritating and insincere.)

Looking over the RfC itself at Talk:North Africa, it was phrased neutrally, so that seems fine. M.Bitton's entry into the discussion was rather stand-offish, but he had an underlying point about lack of sourcing defining the region in terms of the Sahara. But then you provided sources. M.Bitton then got kind of obstructionist in my view, suggesting the sources somehow weren't enough. A more reasonable response might have been that sometimes sources include the Sahara within the definition and sometimes they don't or are silent on the matter. Doing this: "Implemented Senorangel proposal" was a mistake, and amounted to closing the RfC in a way you favored. "Undone Please wait for the RfC closer to decide what to do next" was a reasonable response to that. After that, the discussion basically turned into a two-editor pissing match, and there doesn't seem to be further substantive input, which is still needed.

If I were to independently close that discussion right now, I would conclude that "It should be: North Africa (sometimes Northern Africa), is a region ..." has a rough consensus, but that no consenus was reached on the larger question of what comes after the "...". And that's obviously not a good outcome, since the entire point of the RfC was to answer that question. What you might try is neutrally and concisely advertising the discussion to WT:AFRICA, WT:GEOGRAPHY, maybe even WT:MOSLEAD, as needing further input on how best to write the lead. And keep in mind that leads are meant to summarize the material in the body of the article, so the main part of the article itself needs to cover how various RS (including the additional ones you dug up) define the region, and a summary should naturally emerge from that, even if it ends up as sometimes including and sometimes excluding all or most of the Sahara. I think what I would do (in this order) is work on the body material about sources' definitions, avoiding further conflict with M.Bitton if possible; advertise the discussion to those other venues; then go ask for closure at WP:ANRFC after renewed discussion tapers off. Hope this helps. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 02:36, 21 October 2023 (UTC)

I appreciate the time you took for the detailed feedback and advice.

I think {{adminhelp}} should be used as well for conduct disputes, a level higher than regular editor third opinion (WP:DEALWITHINCIVIL step 7) and a lever lower than an ANI report. Thoughts?
I included my detailed rationale of implementing the proposal in the Talk:North Africa#RfC about the lead sentence thread, which also may address your inquiry about suggesting Closure Request, "Implemented Senorangel proposal" was a mistake", and "Undone Please wait for the RfC closer to decide what to do next" (which also I think they thought someone would close it without requesting closing).
"tend to be irritating to experienced users". Tbh, I posted in their talk page because they had me irritated with their apparent unreasonable attitude ("stand-offish", "obstructionist").
"concisely advertising", will do!

Regards, Thinker78 (talk) 06:02, 21 October 2023 (UTC)

On the template, that's not what it's documented for, so you'd probably need to post on the template talk page about expanding the documented scope of it. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 11:41, 21 October 2023 (UTC)

I was going to follow your advice about disengaging the editor but they are overly hostile. But I appreciate the feedback you provided. It soothes the mind a bit hearing from a fellow editor. Regards, Thinker78 (talk) 19:00, 21 October 2023 (UTC)

Hello SmcCandlish, I was pinged recently and followed the discussions here. The first sentence should inform nonspecialist readers without being overloaded. In this case, a single, clear definition may not exist. Would saying that North Africa has no such definition satisfy being informative in this unusual situation? Senorangel (talk) 02:08, 22 October 2023 (UTC)

@Senorangel: It could well end up that way. Something like "... is a region with varying definitions, all of which include the northern coast of Africa, but vary in how far south the region encompasses, sometimes but not always including most to all of the Sahara desert." Kind of along those lines. As I suggested elsewhere, doing a bunch of sourcing (in the article body) on how various reliable sources define the region should kind of naturally provide sufficient material and "shape" to summarize into a sentence or two for the lead, but I'm skeptical that the RfC or a followup to it will arrive at something very satisfactory without that work being done, because people keep angling to use their own preferred interpretation rather than distill a précis of what the sources agree on and how they differ. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 09:13, 22 October 2023 (UTC)

Should this change to the guideline be reverted?

Resolved

– Commented both there at the related WT:MOSTM discussion; there is some tangential followup below, which turned into more than a month-long debate about MOS:TM revision ideas.

Hi SMcCandlish. I notice you replied to RoyLeban on the talk page, but did you notice their edit to the guideline? Should that not have been discussed before being made? I feel it reads more awkwardly now—especially as the edit introduced the short sentence "Trademarks that begin with a lowercase prefix" that doesn't appear to have a point—but I thought I'd leave it to you to revert as I consider you a guideline expert. Ss112 02:31, 21 October 2023 (UTC)

@Ss112: Some of that edit was good, other aspects of it not so much. I've tried a blended version [2]. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 02:46, 21 October 2023 (UTC)

Thanks. Although I think there are larger concerns with what they've said that I've separately asked an administrator to address, do you see any benefit to weighing in at Talk:I/O (album)? The same user whom you're talking to on the trademarks guideline talk page refuses to accept anything other than Peter Gabriel's word that the title is i/o in lower-case, despite the user acknowledging that secondary news sources that use I/O in capitals exist. (However, he says those are incorrect, despite the title being an acronym.) Either way, it would be very helpful to have other people weigh in when my patience has been exhausted there. Ss112 15:44, 21 October 2023 (UTC)

Glad you brought that to my intention, since it clarifies what the real purpose behind the changes to the guideline page were: making it easier to force Wikipedia to use lower-cased stylizations preferred by trademark holders. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 21:36, 21 October 2023 (UTC)

@Ss112: I just happened to notice this and thought I would respond for clarification.

First, as I've explained elsewhere (and below), my changes on the guideline were unrelated to the i/o album, I just happened to notice the issues when I was editing that page (and I did not attempt to hide this fact). My edits on the i/o page were not the "real purpose". If you think it through, you'll understand that's a ridiculous conjecture because none of the changes I made would apply to the i/o page. What my GF edit was intended to do was to make the guideline clearer and make it match what is actually happening on Wikipedia. Please be more careful when accusing editors of having hidden agendas.

Second, the people arguing for I/O instead of i/o are saying, essentially, that if any sources use I/O, then the title on the page cannot be i/o. That's not what the guideline says, and it's not how Wikipedia works. The argument is three-fold. (a) i/o is not a stylization — it is always used. Claiming it is a stylization is disingenuous. If I/O is shown, it is a deliberate choice by Wikipedia to not use the name given to the work. Wikipedia has a right to make that choice, but we should not lie to people in saying why we are doing it. (b) I believe that a name is a fact, and Wikipedia allows primary sources for facts. If nobody believes the statement to be a fact, that would be a different story, but that's not the case here. (c) The vast majority of secondary sources use i/o, not I/O. Yes, there are exceptions, but there are also people who refer to Bell Hooks and even Iphone. Wikipedia wants a preponderance of sources, not every single source. As you can see on the talk page, I have suggested that we wait until the full album is released in less than a month. Although there is also an i/o song, there are more articles (and will be more articles) on the whole album. I fully expect continued use of i/o by Peter Gabriel and his label and additional secondary sources which will use it as well. RoyLeban (talk) 06:26, 8 November 2023 (UTC)

We've already been over this in excrucitiating detail, and you are playing WP:IDHT games, for which I have no patience. "i/o is not a stylization — it is always used": It absolutely is a stylization within the meaning of MOS:TM and the rest of MoS. No amount of philosophical equivocation about what "stylization" could/might mean in some other context and how such a meaning might relate to or conflict with your personal idea of what a "name" is (which agrees with neither linguistic nor philosophical definitions of proper name, about which only the first to MoS care anyway) is going to change that. And it is not not "always used". You may have a case that it is almost always used, in which case an argument to not render it as "i/o" is weak, but that has nothing to do with the guideline being broken somehow, and making unsupportable arguments like "always used" and "is not a stylization" is never going to convince anyone you are right. No one cares that "[you] believe that a name is a fact", by which you mean that a name stylized a partiicular way is an objective instead of subjective matter; Wikipedia does not, by 20+ years of consensus, approach names in this manner. What this comes down to is that you are inisistent on mimicking the stylization prefer by creators/publishers of things, and Wikipedia is not, and this is never going to change. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 13:19, 8 November 2023 (UTC)

I was commenting here for the benefit of @Ss112 who had accused me of having a hidden agenda. I was restating my argument for clarity. My "always used" comment was w.r.t. usage by the creator of i/o, Peter Gabriel. I could have been clearer there. Sorry.

You are confusing my statements about how the world at large works and how Wikipedia works. Yes, Wikipedia can make rules about how names are shown, but that doesn't change the world outside of Wikipedia. To the world, names are facts. People don't think that other people get to decide what their names are, how they are spelled, or how they are capitalized. I've never seen anyone outside of Wikipedia claim so many things are stylizations. Wikipedia's guidelines and policies don't change that. When you say "stylization," a more accurate phrasing is "what Wikipedia calls a stylization". I also think you are mischaracterizing what I'm saying when I point out real world facts in cases where I think Wikipedia should do better. How can individual decisions be made if discussion isn't allowed? That is not the same as insisting that Wikipedia mirror the real world, though I wish it would. I will endeavor to be clearer w.r.t. comments about the real world vs. Wikipedia.

You're also misunderstanding what I wrote about the guideline not being followed. My point was that there are editors saying that if any sources use uppercase I/O, it means that Wikipedia can't shouldn't use lowercase i/o. As you've explained, that's not what the guideline says.

Finally, for the record, i/o is not some old discussion I'm trying to revisit; the album hasn't even been released yet!

Look, I don't want to argue with you. That wasn't my intent in providing background information to Ss112. RoyLeban (talk) 11:52, 10 November 2023 (UTC)

There is no need at all for WP to say something like "what Wikipedia calls a stylization". It is automatically apparent to everyone (except apparently you) that when WP uses a term in its own internal documentation and rulemaking that the term means what WP means by it, not what some external third party might mean by it in a way that doesn't make any sense within the context of the WP rule. We don't go around writing "what Wikipedia calls a secondary source" or "what Wikipedia calls original research" or "what Wikipedia calls notability", etc., despite such terms provably having divergent meanings in other contexts. And nothing is broken. Our users understand. Here, you're arguing for a distinction between "what Wikipedia calls a stylization" and your personal idiolect interpretation of what "stylization" means which isn't even attested in any real-world RS material that we could conceivably have some reason to care about and account for. In short, if it works for "secondary source", "original research", and "notable", it works prefectly fine for "stylization". If there were a large mass of editors perpetually confused about what "stylization" meant in that material, you might have a point, but they simply do not exist. This makes the point you are pursuing simply pedantic. Cf. WP:LAWYER, WP:BUREAUCRACY, WP:CREEP, etc.; we have no need for this stuff. Our internal material needs to be kept simple, not turned into a long-winded morass of blathering about distinctions no one should be trying to draw in the first place to comply with the rule in question. It is completely clear that MOS:TM intends no such distinctions and is intentionally erasing them, so the fact that you can imagine some is just irrelevant. The material has already been tweaked a couple of times to try to satisfy your claims that it is somehow vague or confusing, so it is even clearer now than it was several weeks ago, yet you're still going on about this. It's just a waste of time at this point. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 17:22, 10 November 2023 (UTC)

The word "stylization" the way it is used on Wikipedia rarely appears in the real world. "Secondary source" and "original research" have basically the same definitions on WP as in the real world. "Notable" is borderline, but news sources, encyclopedias, and other reference works have always had their own detailed definitions of what makes someone or something notable. When discussing if a particular name on WP should reflect the name given by the creator or owner or if it should follow Wikipedia's naming conventions, it is absolutely necessary to talk about how the name is presented in the real world. I happen to think it's a little pedantic to insist that statements must explicitly say "real world" when it's pretty clear what the reference is. But I'll try to be explicit even when I don't think it's necessary.

BTW, you said that 95% of sources should use a particular "stylization" in order for Wikipedia to respect it. Where is that? I could not find it.

There's a term I have promoted in UX design called "signing for natives." The idea is that the main roads in a city don't need signs. Everybody knows what they are. The signing for natives philosophy is: Who needs a sign on Main Street?! Well, non-natives do. Go into most towns in Massachusetts and you'll find they have a Mass Ave (and, frequently a Com, or Commonwealth Ave). What you mostly won't find is street signs that tell you that it's Mass Ave. Everybody knows it, supposedly. Thank goodness that GPS navigators don't follow the same principal, but it wreaked havoc before everybody had one on our phone. I got totally lost one day because I came across an unsigned street and assumed it was Mass Ave. It turned out to be Com Ave instead. Signing for natives is bad.

What you are basically saying is WP doesn't need to explain things that all editors know (supposedly). It's signing for natives, and it's flawed.

All that said, I do appreciate your help in clarifying the guideline. RoyLeban (talk) 11:49, 12 November 2023 (UTC)

These assertions are easy to disprove in moments. Google for stylization of text [3]. Read various of the top results; they are about applying italics, boldfacing, all-caps, font coloring, special typefaces, and other effects to text material, and this is exactly what MOS:TM means by it (along with other MoS sections that deal with such matters beyond the TM context). Next, Google definitions of "secondary source" OR "secondary sources" -wikipedia. Note that the definitons are all over the map, from "one that was created later by someone that did not experience firsthand or participate in the events in which the author is writing about" to "works that analyze, interpret, or merely describe historical or scientific events", "one that was created later by someone who did not experience first-hand or participate in the events or conditions you’re researching", "based on firsthand accounts or records of a thing being researched or studied but that is not itself a firsthand account", "analyze a scholarly question and often use primary sources as evidence", "created by scholars who interpret the past through the examination of primary sources and the research of others .... typically the commentary about your topic", and so on. If you get into law material, you find that there is no such thing as a tertiary source in that field (in the US, anyway), and that what we define as tertiary sources are considered secondary ones in the legal field (and this is true in several others as well). These definitions do not agree with each other, so cannot agree with our own. They are often confined to a specific field, and they are all missing one or more aspects of what secondary source means on Wikipedia. It's why we define it carefully in our own terms (along with primary source and tertiary source). We have long had problems with new editors from specific disciplines trying to apply their discipline's definitions to our material. On notable, the fact that some other publications have the concept (under that name or otherwise) but it doesn't match our definition was precisely my point to begin with.

There is no wikilawyering lever to press here. We don't specify it as a number, but as "overwhelming majority of reliable sources", "a substantial majority of independent, reliable sources", "consitently used in reliable sources", and various other phrasing in various MoS pages. The practical, de facto application of this in thousands of WP:RM and other discussions over many years is an expectation of well over 90% usage in current, independent, reliable sources. If the usage is more mixed than that, people will continue to push for avoiding the stylization because it's not what is consistently found in sources independent of the subject; when source usage is more than trivially mixed, we have no compelling reason not to follow the defaults of our own style guide, especially when an unusual stylization is apt to have an WP:UNDUE attention-getting effect toward one party or their product/service.

When our article title and in-wikivoice article text are not using a stylization, but the work creator or trademark holder does use one, the first thing we already do is this: "Foo (stylized ƒ00) is ....". So, your "a particular name on WP should reflect the name given by the creator or owner ... talk about how the name is presented in the real world" issue is already accounted for. If you haven't already noticed this, then I think the amount of time you are devoting to trying to convince me to change my mind or the community to change its guidelines is very poorly spent (for all of us).

On "signposting for the natives" (a clearer phrasing, since "signing" often means "using sign language", or "writing one's signature"), I don't know what specific lines in MoS or elsewhere you're referring to. Your street signs story doesn't appear to be analogous to anything in this too-long discussion.

If you're not sure when to use principle versus principal you are probably not in a good position to fulminate about line-items in style guides. The WP:CIR principle is required in triplicate in this area: you need to be editorially competent in this collaborative environment as usual, but you also have to have a lot of experience in policywriting, and considerable English-language usage expertise across multiple registers of English writing. Taken all together, these have to translate into an ability to digest real-world usage data (ngrams, etc.) and recommentations of diverse external style guides, distill out anything not ideal for encyclopedic writing in particular, then synthesize these with Wikipedia-specific concerns and requirements, and produce WP:P&G-type wording that very succinctly encapsulates community best practice (which is based on years of experience and observation of actual practices here and the consensuses behind them, not based on a desire to legislate a change in that behavior), while also not conflicting with any other policy, guideline, or other operating principle, or having any other unintended negative consequences, all while fending off PoV-motivated attempts to engineer conflicting results to favor one special interest/viewpoint or another. It's extraordinarily difficult, and a only tiny sliver of our editorial pool are actually capable of it. They generally watchlist and respond at MoS talk pages, and if you can't convince the editors at the appropriate one that the change you want to make is a good idea, no amount of arguing with an individual in user-talk is going to make any difference. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 16:33, 12 November 2023 (UTC)

Sometimes you seem very reasonable, sometimes you don't. If you look up my background, you'll find that I know more about text stylization than almost everybody, having been the primary functional designer of the FullWrite word processor (the first 100% WYSIWYG word processor) a few decades ago. I don't need a lecture on stylization of text. Stylization of names, to use Wikipedia's phrasing, is a different topic which happens to use the same word. (Yes, some "stylized" names might use text stylization, but an uppercase letter after an Mc or Mac, or the uppercase letter in FullWrite or RoyLeban, or lowercase i/o, is simply not text stylization.) Yes, how names should be shown ("stylization of names") is discussed in style guides (like, say, the AP style guide) but it is a term not used by most people. I'm not going to nitpick the rest.

Attacking me for a typo I made on a late night edit just isn't nice. (Check the two typos you made in "... you are inisistent on mimicking the stylization prefer by ..." that I noticed but didn't mention; they have no bearing on your competence.)

Thanks for suggesting a change to a phrase I've been using for decades (and instant apologies for my sarcasm). It's "signing for natives" not "signposting for natives" because "signpost(ing)" has a specific meaning in UX, which is not the same as this usage. My point was that Wikipedia guidelines frequently use signing for natives (not signposting for natives) because it is assumed that everybody knows the same things, but they don't. The 90% number is an example. Additional detail which helps non-natives shouldn't be summarily dismissed as merely fighting off jerks.

And that's a segue to agreeing that you're right that editing policies/guidelines/rules/etc is difficult. That's why your thoughts & advice have been useful. I still appreciate it. We don't have to continue this here. As I said, I commented here because of the false accusation. And I still think MOS:TM and MOS:NAMES could be clearer. I'll let it rest for now and look back in a while when I have fresh eyes. RoyLeban (talk) 11:36, 14 November 2023 (UTC)

Fair enough; sorry. It didn't seem like a typo but like a deliberate word choice, and we do get people showing up at MoS on a pretty regular basis who don't understand spelling, word usage, grammar, punctuation, etc., yet trying to make changes at MoS to conform to something their middle-school teacher said 30 years ago, or something their colleagues do at work, or some idiolect idea they've come up with on their own, so perhaps I have an ingrained reaction pattern. I don't look into editors' backgrounds here unless there's a real reason to do so (e.g. strong evidence of CoI editing). I just address the arguments or behavior in front of me, and tend to forget the user name after a week anyway.

I'm mystified that you can be presented with a category of personal names like "McCandlish" and "van den Hoedt" on the one hand and stylized trademarks like "SONY" and "SE7EN", which are clearly divisible into two conceptually different categories but are all proper names, and then when given the album title "I/O" or "i/o", decide that it belongs in the first of these categories. Even if there is no way to convince you otherwise (and after this exhausting discussion that appears to be the case), it ultimately doesn't matter because our style guidelines really, really clearly put this in the second category and treat everything in it as a class subject to the same rules. It's just something to live with. WP might end up going with i/o anyway, but it will only be on the basis that nearly every independent source goes along with that style, not on the basis of whether it's a name (of course it's a name), or what the trademark holder considers "official", or whether you can come up with an alternative meaning for the word stylization which is not the meaning employed by MoS.

I think what might be hanging you up is the assumption (which might be correct, though I'm unaware of any evidence of it so far) that Gabriel himself would write "i/o" in running text (unlike, say, Sony which writes "Sony" in regular print despite their logo reading "SONY"). But there are many other cases of this, like Firebrand Labs who insist on writing "firebrand labs"; if they get an article here, it will be at "Firebrand Labs" and will begin "Firebrand Labs (stylized firebrand labs) is ....". USA Today consistently refers to itself as "USA TODAY" but only the first part of that is an acronym, and our article is thus at USA Today, opening with "USA Today (often stylized in all caps) ...." After 20+ years of applying the same ruleset (which is actually even consistent with AP Stylebook for once, along with all the more academic-leaning style guides) we're not going to change this because one person has a wild hare about a particular album. I've said many times that there is no line-item in MoS that various editors do not want to change, and there is no editor who doesn't want to change at least one MoS line-item. (That even goes for us MoS regulars; I would change at least 100 things in it if I could. At least in theory. Really, even if I had consensus to do so, doing it this late in the game would provoke considerable chaos and community ill-will because these matters are ultimately rather arbitrary and of value in being stable, while changing them may affect thousands even potentially millions of articles for twiddles most people don't care about.).

"Signposting" in the UX sense seems compatible with your "for natives" criticism. One wouldn't leave off the "Enter your payment information:" signposting above a credit card form on the assumption that "natives" (people already using your website on a regular basis) already know what the form is for, or that users in general would be able to figure it out. Lots of stuff gets left out of MoS and other policies and guidelines and left to pretty vague terminology, by design. As much as is practical is left to editorial judgment and consensus, and we know from experience that putting in something like "at least 90% of sources" will just lead to disruptive wikilawyering and system-gaming behavior, like attempts to fudge search and ngram results to hit the target. We don't impose numbers lite this on any internal processes like RfCs or XfDs. Not even RfA; it used to have a strict numeric cut-off, but this was changed by broad community consensus to a pretty wide "discretionary range" band of 65–75% support which then results in a "'crat chat", a secondary and constrained consensus discussion that is a bit like an electoral college. This intentionally nebulous sense of consensus formation is not the most efficient means of doing things, but it's the one we have.

Sometimes it produces undesirable outlier results, too. It is very probable that k.d. lang should move to K. D. Lang, because an examination of independent source usage shows neither an overwhelmingly consistent application of lowercase (especially outside the entertainment press), nor "k.d." or "K.D." initials formatting in particular, with "K. D." and "KD" showing up frequently, meaning there is no reason to not simply apply WP's default style. Sometimes cases like this linger for a while simply because no one has the stomach for an RM that is certain to arouse the ire of a bunch of heavy fans of the subject. Gabriel is apt to be similar; there's a whole camp of editors obsessed with "author/artist/studio intent" who like to mimic album and song and movie title stylizations. They occasionally get their way (e.g. Spider-Man: Far From Home which obviously should be at Spider-Man: Far from Home), when virtually all of the "independent" source material is entertainment journalism, a genre which bends over backwards to "obey" stylization of work titles, because they are kept afloat entirely by advertising money from studios, networks, and record labels, and so they are not in fact independent of the subject but fiscally beholden. Eventually the Spider-Man movie article will be renamed, after there is enough coverage in other media (film journals, etc.) to demonstrate that sources in the aggregate are not near-consistently using From, and that it's simply entertainment press doing it to "obey" Paramount's marketing preferences. But all of these pop-culture cases I've mentioned have been subject to knock-down-drag-out fights about their article titles (sometimes more than once) because of their connection pop culture and fandom, and few of us have an appetite to fire up that noise and stress all over again, so they are generally left alone for a long time.
— SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 17:54, 14 November 2023 (UTC)

We agree that the difference between names like McCandlish and SONY and SE7EN is context and usage. We disagree on details. I daresay you never use Mccandlish or MCCandlish, whereas Sony does use both Sony and SONY, and the producers/creators of SE7EN used Seven, SEVEN, and SE7EN (clearly the last is therefore a stylization). In contrast, if somebody else uses Mccandlish, that doesn't change the correct way it should appear, no matter how often they do so. I ran across somebody recently who had a name like OHare (I can't recall the actual name). Like O’Hare, but no apostrophe. I would say that person has a slightly different last name that someone with the name O’Hare. I have a friend with a hyphenated first name, like One-Two. The hyphen is left out a LOT, perhaps more often then it's left in. That doesn't change his name. In these cases, Wikipedia should use OHare and One-Two, not O’Hare and One Two. (And, FWIW, when I was in school, my name would sometimes get written as LeBan. Obviously it must have been French; it's not. It happens very rarely now, not sure why it changed.)

I can't comment on Firebrand/firebrand simply because I'm not familiar with them. I'd have to research USA TODAY/Today to have an opinion. Personally, I don't discount entertainment press.

"Signposting for natives" is a subset of "signing for natives." Your examples are therefore both. A lot of Wikipedia and a lot of MoS is written for people who basically already know the subject. Jump into many an article on physics and you can't understand it unless you already understand it. That's all "signing for natives" and has nothing to do with signposting.

Your comment on hard %'s being gameable is certainly a good point. I'll bear that in mind. RoyLeban (talk) 07:32, 17 November 2023 (UTC)

"if somebody else uses Mccandlish, that doesn't change the correct way it should appear, no matter how often they do so." There probably is someone who uses that spelling, and I know for a fact there are some that use "MacCandlish". See https://Cuindlis.org/variants/ – there are many, many versions of this name, and there are two important facts to consider: Until very modern times, various pretty-close spellings were simply interchangeable, even in reference to the same person, and often even in the same person's own writing; they might use "MacCandlish" (or "Mac Candlish") in their youth, then "M'Candlish" or "McCandlish" or "Mc Candlish" or "MaCandlish" (or "Macandlish" or "MacAndlish" ...), or "M^cCandlish" later on, or even switch to "Candlish". I've even seen cases of switches to much more different spellings, e.g. from McCanles to McCandless. Secondly, the idea any of these particular renditions is the one and only possible/correct way to spell the name for a particular individual is an ultra-modern idea (maybe the last 3 generations, tops) and one that is not universally accepted. This is particularly true when multiple languages are at play; e.g. plenty of the Irish and the Gaelic-speaking Scots have an English name spelling and an Irish or Scottish Gaelic one, and they significantly differ, and can even be rendered multiple ways in Irish or Scottish Gaelic depending on whether you choose the modern orthography or the traditional/old-fashioned one. I know lots of Hispanics in New Mexico and California whose names "properly" have one or more diacritics, but who don't use them except when writing in Spanish. (For my own part, I go by "Stanton" as my first name, my entire adult life, but I have family members who insist on calling me "Stan", even though they know I don't use it. So, my name actually is "Stan" for a particular subset of people, no matter what I say to the contrary. And quite a few of them will likely outlive me. Lost cause. A bit like Cristoforo Colombo is always going to be known as Christopher Columbus to millions of people, whether he would have preferred that or not, and no matter how many Italians or whatnot say that isn't the proper way to spell his name.

It's really not something for WP editors to get hung up on, and especially not to engage in OR about what "must" be "the" "correct" way to spell someone's name. I've frequently seen people try to do this with living subjects (especially with diacritics) and seen them be wrong (in both directions). When it comes to more outright stylization like "k.d. lang" we're in even more subjective territory, where a personal name and trademark are blending into each other. Many style guides would simply not accept "CCH Pounder" and insist on "C. C. H. Pounder" or "C.C.H. Pounder" depending on their house style for rendering initials. WP has gone the step (which not everyone agrees with) of making exceptions like "CCH Pounder" when, but only when, both the nameholder and the vast majority of independent sources agree on that rendition. That's where stuff like "SONY" and "SE7EN" fail, and where "i/o" or "I/O" are going to eventually result in some debate. And it won't have more that a smidgin to do with the trademarkholder's preference; we usually already know what that is. It all comes down to independent source usage and whether it's just overwhelmingly in favor of the stylized version. As for your friend One-Two, I don't think anyone wants to write it "One Two" or "OneTwo", or we'd keep having circular arguments at places like Talk:JoBeth Williams, but we don't; our habit is to treat personal names as they are treated by the proponderance of the sources, and to give a bit of WP:ABOUTSELF deference to living individuals, but not to dead ones and not to corporations or other non-individual entites or their products.

On the "many an article on physics" matter, you should probably check out the lengthy debate happening at WT:Make technical articles understandable and a split-off of that now at WT:MOSLEAD. Both discussions could probably use additional input from new eyes and brains instead of just being the same dozen editors arguing in circles. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 08:37, 17 November 2023 (UTC)

@RoyLeban:, I just happened to notice this too. First of all, with all due respect, I am not reading your paragraphs on a topic I tapped out of last month. I have no interest in this debate you are still having nearly a month later. I greatly thank SMcCandlish for still having the patience to respond because I certainly don't. Leaving the topic aside, I implore you to reread my two preceding messages at the top of this thread. Nowhere did I talk about or imply what your motives were. I didn't even mention the word "agenda" let alone imply you had one. It was SMcCandlish who stated what your supposed "real purpose" for editing the guideline was and not me ("Glad you brought that to my intention, since it clarifies what the real purpose behind the changes to the guideline page were: making it easier to force Wikipedia to use lower-cased stylizations preferred by trademark holders"). I asked SMcCandlish if your change to the guideline should be reverted as it had not been discussed then asked him to weigh in at the talk page of I/O, that's literally it. You tell me to be more careful about something I didn't even do, then you state twice (from what I skimmed) that I was the one who said you had a "hidden agenda". I think you need to read more carefully and not tell me to be careful in regards to something I never did. Finally, there was and is no point in pinging me; I turned all pings off years ago. I am not continuing this beyond this message either. I am clarifying that I never said nor implied you had any agenda whatsoever. Thank you. Ss112 14:09, 18 November 2023 (UTC)

"Agenda" is probably too loaded a word. It's become clear in this discussion that RoyLeban has a view toward "obeying" or 'respecting" or whatever you want to call it the style of trademarked names more than the consensus behind MOS:TM is willing to tolerate. This sort of thing isn't uncommon (every line item in MoS, and in every policy and guidleine for that matter, has its detractors). I think we've talked this out about as much as it can be talked out, and a user-talk discussion of this sort isn't going to have any effect on the guidelines anyway. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 17:58, 18 November 2023 (UTC)

A few things. Thanks for saying "agenda" is too loaded. I certainly don't have a secret agenda. The thing that bothers me the most is the false statement that Wikipedia rules are reality outside of Wikipedia and that's why "stylized as" bothers me so much. It frequently states something that isn't true and borders on OR (i.e., it's easy to find many sources for a supposedly stylized name but I have yet see a citation for a source that says it's a stylization). In many cases, the reality is that Wikipedia is stylizing the name according to its rules, not vice versa. We've discussed this already and I don't know a way to fix it. This statement on MOS:TM is an example: "Adidas, on the other hand, uses "adidas" rather than "Adidas" in running text when referring to the company, and the stylism is therefore mentioned." adidas has used that name, with that casing, for 74 years(!), yet Wikipedia pretends the name of the company is Adidas. It's not (see, for example: https://www.barrons.com/market-data/stocks/addyy, though yes, there are other places that refuse to respect the company's chosen name). It is Wikipedia that is stylizing it with an uppercase A and pretending it's the other way around, so it is stating something that is untrue, and this happens in many cases. If you have any suggestions on how to fix this, I'd appreciate your thoughts.

A minor point, SONY and SE7EN are not at all similar to i/o. i/o is like adidas, though it hasn't been 74 years.

Also, we're sort of agreeing with respect to what you wrote about name spellings (though, FYI, how long single spellings have been standardized varies with language and location). There are some on Wikipedia who would argue that names like McCandlish should be shown the same way every time — Wikipedia has it's rules! So Joe Mccandlish and Mary MacCandlish would have their names spelled as if they were other people. I don't think that the spelling (or pronunciation) of people's names is ever up for debate. It seems we agree there, and Wikipedia does seem to respect that. We disagree on casing and non-personal names. So we can just agree to disagree and I'm going to continue to argue about the point I made above, when it is an issue. Wikipedia's rules shouldn't allow it to be inaccurate or state things that aren't true.

One thing I've learned here is to be more precise to avoid the confusion where people think I'm talking about Wikipedia rules when I'm talking about reality. Thanks for that. RoyLeban (talk) 12:20, 26 November 2023 (UTC)

@RoyLeban: While I am still done with this discussion, I must point out, Roy, you are the one who first mentioned the word "agenda" in this entire thread (CTRL + F agenda: "Please be more careful when accusing editors of having hidden agendas"), now you're thanking SMcCandlish for saying it's too loaded a term when you used it to characterize what you thought I said but was actually what SMcCandlish had said?????? Even with me saying I wasn't intending to reply, I thought you at least would have acknowledged you attributed speculation about motives to the wrong person here. Ss112 13:32, 26 November 2023 (UTC)

@Ss112: I did feel that your comments implied that I had a hidden agenda, though you didn't use the word explicitly. That felt unfair to me, especially since I am always open and honest. To be clear, my comment was about what you wrote, not what SMcCandlish wrote. That said, I understand you think I am accusing you unfairly. I'll accept that you weren't intentionally trying to be unfair to me if you'll accept that I wasn't intentionally trying to be unfair to you. I know my goal is always to improve Wikipedia, and I'll assume that's true for you too. Reasonable people / reasonable editors can disagree without having hidden agendas. Let's move on.

If you have any suggestions on the issue I raised above (how to avoid the statement "stylized as..." which is frequently untrue and basically OR, because the real world reality is the opposite is true), I would be interested in your thoughts. Even if your suggestion is merely a good place to have a discussion. Thanks. RoyLeban (talk) 07:33, 27 November 2023 (UTC)

Arbitrary break 1

That's actually a very different spin on the whole debate. Maybe it's just that you don't like the word "stylized", and if we changed it to something else, like "rendered", "presented", "represented", the entire issue would just evaporate. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 12:04, 27 November 2023 (UTC)

I'll admit that it has taken me time to articulate well that part of the issue, but I've been talking about the fundamental difference between the real world and Wikipedia's version of it from the beginning. Confusion about that hasn't helped the discussion here or elsewhere (when I've said things are facts and others disagree because Wikipedia rules say otherwise on Wikipedia). This is far from the only place or way that Wikipedia asserts that it's rules/guidelines represent reality when it doesn't, but we needn't get into that here.

I will think about this, but I don't think any word replacing "stylized" fixes the problem. In the adidas case, the company was using that name 52 years before Wikipedia was founded, yet the assertion (with any word) is that the name is Adidas and the company is merely stylizing it (or rendering it, or presenting it, ...) as "adidas". This simply isn't a true statement. A true statement is that Wikipedia's style guidelines say adidas should be stylized as Adidas on Wikipedia, so the correct word is something like "actually," resulting in the somewhat awkward:

Adidas AG (actually adidas AG since 1949 and usually given as simply adidas, and shown as Adidas per Wikipedia's style guide), is a German ...

or perhaps:

Adidas AG (actually adidas AG since 1949 and usually given as simply adidas [see MOS:TM]), is a German ...

If you don't like "actually", I'm open to suggestion. My guess is that the best place to bring this up will be MOS:TM.

BTW, what happened with your suggestion here: MOS:TM#Minor consolidation merge — I notice you did not make a change. I completely agree that cross references should be used. My larger concern is that a bunch of Trademarks applies to Names (all of which is buried in Biography, which is hardly intuitive) and there is therefore overlap with not just the section you mentioned but much of the entire MOS:Biography#Names section. If Biography was renamed People and Biography was a section in People (People#Biography), that would help, but I doubt that change could happen (though note that MOS:People does redirect to MOS:Biography, so perhaps it could happen).

Thanks.

RoyLeban (talk) 07:31, 29 November 2023 (UTC)

You'd never get consensus for "actually", since it is a value judgment and is basically saying that Wikipedia and everyone else in the world who write it as "Adidas" (which is the vast majority of independent sources) are wrong. I.e., we're right back to your confusion of proper names and how they are treated in English by independent writers, versus how they are styled by trademark holders for marketing purposes. I think at this point we just have to accept that you have an unusual and unwavering, immovable view about this, and this view is not compatible with how WP titles and writes articles. And that's okay. Lots of editors have a difference of opinion regarding some WP norm, but the project goes on just fine anyway, and such people are even constructive editors as long as they accept that they're not going to get their way on their pet peeve and don't pursue it disruptively. On the "Minor consolidation merge", I tend not to act on those for weeks or longer, to be certain there aren't principled objections. The material's been unhelpfully arranged for a very long time, and a little longer isn't going to break anything. I doubt there'd be any appetite for moving MoS's biography page to a "people" title, since biographies are about people, and writing about people is writing bigraphies, so it would be changing for the sake of changing, without a clear benefit. MOS:TM and MOS:NAMES don't overlap as much as you think they do; the vast majority of what is at NAMES is specific to human names and does not apply to organizational trademarks and their analogues. The bits that do overlap will be covered (after my tweaking as proposed in that thread) at TM, with cross-references from NAMES. The only benefit I can think of to renaming MOS:BIO to a "people" title would be consistency with WP:NCP, but that's just a guideline and we'd lose consistency with WP:BLP which is a policy; if total consistency were desired, WP:NCP should move to WP:Naming conventions (biography). — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 21:06, 29 November 2023 (UTC)

Thanks for your reply. Your statement "since it is a value judgment and is basically saying that Wikipedia and everyone else in the world ... are wrong" is interesting. The status quo on Wikipedia is that "stylized as" is a value judgment and is basically saying that the company itself is wrong about its own name. That just isn't reality outside of Wikipedia. In the real world, people and companies get to choose their own names. As a super obvious example, we don't refer to people by dead names (though, yeah, there are some bad people who insist on dead naming people, but Wikipedia is doing the right thing). We don't insist that Meta Platforms is really named Facebook. We do, apparently, insist that adidas is Adidas.

I know you think it's a pet peeve. For me, it's about accuracy.

Side note: Interestingly, I just looked up Twitter and (a) the page is Twitter, not X, and (b) it said*, inaccurately, that X is stylized as 𝕏, which just isn't true. Their logo is 𝕏, they do not stylize their name that way (see, for example, https://twitter.com/en/tos and https://business.twitter.com/en/basics/intro-twitter-for-business.html). The statement is equivalent to saying that Apple stylizes their name as . They do not. [*I wrote "said" because I just fixed it, and also added a Talk page section.]

When I write this up for general discussion, do you mind if I quote your statement? I think it, especially combined with my contrasting statement, represents the issue really well.

On your merge, if/when you do it, I am happy to help figure out the best way to do it.

On Biography vs. People, people's names are used in far more places than anything you might call a biography. I don't know the number, but I'd guess between 25% and 50% of all articles cite a person's name. Of course, the vast majority of those names are unremarkable, but those pages represent an order of magnitude or two more than the number of biographical articles. I suspect the name Biography persists mostly because "it's always been that way."

RoyLeban (talk) 05:41, 30 November 2023 (UTC)

Re: "The status quo on Wikipedia is that 'stylized as' is a value judgment and is basically saying that the company itself is wrong about its own name." No, and we've been over this before. You know by now, after weeks of circular discussion, that Wikipedia does not mean by "name" or by "stylization" what you like them to mean in your own speech and writing, so substituting your own definition of what "stylization" of a "name" means into a summary of what Wikipedia is saying in its own voice in its guideline is a fallacy of equivocation and a straw man, simultaneously. This is not in any way related to deadnaming, and in fact WP routinely includes deadnames of subjects who have been deceased for more than a short amount of time. Even the notion of banning deadnames from the articles of the recently deceased is a hot topic at WT:BIO right now (including an ongoing revert war), and the closest it has gotten to consensus is that such an elision is not required if the name in question has been reported in multiple RS that have in-depth coverage of the subject. "We don't insist that Meta Platforms is really named Facebook" has nothing to do with this either; they are different names (in the sense that WP means names) and are not related to different stylations (as Wikipedia means that word) of the same name, e.g. "Facebook" versus the "facebook" of their wordmark. As long as you keep trying to redefine "stylizations" as Wikipedia uses that term to mean "different names" as you personally define that term, not as Wikipedia defines it, then you're never going to budge from your notion that our guidelines are broken, and this sort of disucussion with you is going to always be circular.

"I know you think it's a pet peeve. For me, it's about accuracy." Kind of the same issue. This is not in any way an accuracy issue (as long as the stylization, as WP defines that term, is in the lead so that readers know they're at the right article) as far as WP is concerned; it's simply a writing style matter. Otherwise it would not be in a style guideline but in a content guideline or in article title policy. It really would not be possible for MOS:TM or WP:OFFICIALNAME to exist if your view were accepted here. This has not changed at all in WP's entire history. You are nowhere near the first editor to make arguments that it would be more "accure" or "true" or "respectful" or etc. to use the stylized names (WP's definition) preferred by the subject, what you like to think of as their true/correct names. Consensus on the matter has never budged. We use what WP calls a stylized name only if it overwhelmingly dominates in independent sources. The guideline strongly discourages such stylization (as WP defines it) by default, because obviously the natural "monkey see, monkey do" inclination of editors who are fans of Topic A is to include such name stylization (despite few indepedent sources doing it) for their pet topic if they see it done for Topic B (which happens to be stylized that way because it's near-universal in the source material). The average editor can't see the difference (because it requires source research to demonstrated it) unless it is explained clearly to them, so we explain it clearly to them.

Some of our pages change names in response to real-world news slowly if at all. Per WP:COMMONNAME and WP:OFFICIALNAME, WP is under no obligation to use as our article title the different name (under either definition) that is preferred by the trademark holder. Most of the world still calls it "Twitter" and until that changes (probably some time next year) WP will, too. Kanye West is another example. Even most entertainment news (the mostly like to a "respect" a celeb rebrand) still refers to him by that name then makes some mention that he semi-recently changed to just Ye. If next year or so, sources mostly take to calling him Ye, then WP will also. But only if the sources do so; going back much further, very few RS have taken to calling Cat Stevens by his later chosen name Yusuf Islam or even later simple Yusuf, so WP doesn't either, and likely never will. As for Twitter's lead, you already fixed [4] someone's overzealous attempt to mimic a logo. But even the material you tweaked should arguably be pared down to remove any discussion of the Unicode character in the lead, since it is not leadworthy material (it is not part of the summary of the most important material about the company and service, giving WP:DUE weight to what is mentioned). I just removed it from the lead and merged your source into the sectional material about the logo, so we'll see if that sticks.

"do you mind if I quote your statement?" I'm not sure which one you mean, but in general what people say on here is open to be fairly and accurately quoted in some other discussion.

On WP:Manual of Style/Biography: If you're sure the page should be renamed, I'm sure you know how WP:RM works, but I would not expect such an RM to be successful, because the gain is subjective and not without cost.
— SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 07:14, 30 November 2023 (UTC)

You're misunderstanding me. I'll assume it's unintentional. It's not about the word "stylized" or even the word "name" or even how Wikipedia uses the words. It is that Wikipedia is stating, in wikivoice, something that is the opposite of true in the real world. Unfortunately, many people believe that Wikipedia's assertion of truth actually is true in the real world, and that's why I feel things like this are important. Wikipedia's style guidelines are just that — Wikipedia's style guidelines. The words just make it worse. While Wikipedia has the right to use words with different meanings than they have in the real world, it is misleading to the 99.9% of Wikipedia visitors who are not active editors (and even among active editors, I would wager that none know the details of every policy and guideline; I'm know that I'm not even close). This shouldn't be ignored — with great power comes great responsibility.

When an article states that (e.g.) the name is Adidas and that adidas is merely a stylization, whatever words are used, it is backwards from the real world, and no amount of citing Wikipedia guidelines and rules, or even independent sources is going to change that. It is also misleading to 99.9% of Wikipedia visitors. In the real world, adidas gets to pick their own name, and no amount of mistaken references over the last 74 years changes that. The world at large almost always believes people and companies when they state their own names. Yes, new changes (like Twitter) can be an exception, but adidas adopted that name long before either of us were born, and 52 years before Wikipedia even existed.

Of course, this is all compounded by the fact that MediaWiki has a bug (or, charitably, a flaw) which prevents pages from starting with a lowercase letter, leading many editors to believe that an article title cannot start with a lowercase letter. Why that has never been fixed is beyond me. (And are the roots of the casing style guideline because of that? Can we ever know for sure?)

FWIW, I brought up Facebook/Meta Platforms because sources don't come anywhere close to 95% using Meta over Facebook or Alphabet over Google. It shows inconsistency.

The statement I want to quote is: You'd never get consensus for "actually", since it is a value judgment and is basically saying that Wikipedia and everyone else in the world who write it as "Adidas" (which is the vast majority of independent sources) are wrong. which is the opposite of what I believe to be true — value judgments are apparently in the eye of the beholder. I understand your opinion and disagree with it.

I know I'm not going to change your mind, but you have helped me refine exactly how to explain the problem and I appreciate that. I'll be rereading this discussion when I write up a formal proposal for change. We don't need to discuss here further.

On the Twitter lead change, I completely agree that the logo sentence didn't belong in the lead, but it was there already and I try to make a minimal change when I think somebody might make a knee jerk revert, as happens far too often on Wikipedia. Thank you for the follow-up.

RoyLeban (talk) 05:30, 2 December 2023 (UTC)

I don't believe that I'm misunderstanding you at all, you just don't have a rebuttal to mount against my refutation (as demonstrated by your month-long inability to rebut it, and instead just circling back to repeating your original position as if never refuted.) Let's go over it yet again: You are asserting things like "Wikipedia is stating, in wikivoice, something that is the opposite of true in the real world" and "When an article states that (e.g.) the name is Adidas and that adidas is merely a stylization, whatever words are used, it is backwards from the real world". This you advancing a position about your beliefs about the meaning of terms like "true" and "name" and "stylization", that are entirely subjective and do not agree with the consensus interpetation and use of them on Wikipedia. This is a classic example of a WP:GREATWRONGS issue. It's also a fallacy of begging the question, a form of circular reasoning, and laced with psychologist's fallacy: you are making the proposition that when Wikipedia is not stylizing names (by which I mean the WP meanings not yours) the way trademark holders like to in their marketing, that this is falsifying the names, and your circular rationale for this is the very proposition itself, just in different wording: that these are their "true" names, so any rendering of them otherwise must be "false", and on top of this you argue from a position that your perception of this stuff is objectively true "real world"! – we'll get to that below), when the fact that nearly no one agrees with you demonstrates that it is necessarily subjective.

"Wikipedia's style guidelines are just that — Wikipedia's style guidelines" is exactly correct. This is a style matter, according to the consensus of the editors on this site (or MOS:TM simply could not exist with a {{Guideline}} on it and be followed by everyone), and no amount of dislike of this fact by you is going to change it. It being a style matter, by our definition, the only standard to apply to it here is our style guide, since WP is not written according to off-site style guides, and is written according to our internal one.

Styling a name differently from a trademark holder's preference is not "us[ing] words with different meanings than they have in the real world"; using cat to include civets and genets (which are feliformes but not felids) would be an example of using a word, cat, with a different meaning than it has in the real world, and notably WP is not doing that. (Slangish usage that broad is actually attested in the phrase "cat-poop coffee", but is an unencyclopedic misnomer we just handle with a redirect.) Styling a name differently from a trademark holder's preference is using the same word with the same meaning but a different stylization. You can argue until you're blue in the face that these constitue "different names" but consensus does not agree with you, and it is not defined this way in WP guidelines or policy.

Your position that adidas is the "true" "name" of the company in the "real" world is immediately and firmly disprovable [5]; nearly no one uses lower-case adidas. Such usage proofs work for nearly all trademarks and similar stylized names, and consistently show that the plain-English, unstilized renderings are the ones used by the majority of writers in this language. The very rare times when n-grams and other usage evidence, e.g. an aggregate review of usage at Google News and Google Scholar, show that a trademark stylization is actually strongly preferred in real-world reliable source usage, is when (and only when) WP also uses the stylized version (thus CCH Pounder instead of the C. C. H. Pounder redirect that follows MOS:INITIALS, and Deadmau5 using the letter substitution with Deadmaus being a redir, and Spider-Man: Far From Home instead of the MOS:5LETTER-compliant Spider-Man: Far from Home redir.

You are trying over and over and over again to argue from a subjective personal principle, that exists in your head and which is not persuasive to anyone around you, that what the trademark owner prefers must be implemented in our material, but this against the fact (based on muliple better-accepted principles that you just won't hear) of multiple WP guidelines, including MOS:TM and WP:OFFICIALNAME and the WP:COMMONNAME policy. No amount of repeating your idiolect definitions of words and your personal principle viewpoint is going to change any of this. It's been this way for 20+ years without budging, because our way of writing trademarked (and similar) names is firmly grounded in policy concerns, including WP:NPOV as well as COMMONNAME, and has very broad editorial support. You are just going have to accept that WP, like all major publishers, has its own house style even if you don't like every line item specified in it. "you have helped me refine exactly how to explain the problem": There's no evidence of that in this discussion. You've been repetitive of the same "position statement", never hearing much less addressing any refutation of it; if you are refuted, you just engage in hand-waving and then circle back to proof by assertion. It is indistinguishable from an argument based on religious faith. But whatever; you can quote what you want, and post whatever proposal you want. That would probably be preferable to this user-talk discussion continuing interiminably. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 07:04, 2 December 2023 (UTC)

I really want to be brief (I won't succeed as well as I'd like). We disagree. Therefore I must be wrong. You have argued against things I have said. Therefore you have "refuted" my statements and I must be wrong. We both have opinions, but yours are facts and I am just wrong. You're dismissing company names as merely "marketing" and that's a fact, not your opinion. I must be wrong. This is frustrating.

You agree that Wikipedia's style guidelines are just style guidelines. Great! I'm sorry you don't see that, as a result of lthis, Wikipedia is asserting, to the 99.9% of visitors who don't know how Wikipedia uses certain words, things that are not true.

I wrote up some arguments refuting some things you just wrote, but I'm leaving it out. This is too long already.

I'm not saying Wikipedia must respect, say, adidas's self-declared name of 74 years and not have an upper case A at the beginning. It doesn't even have to use the correct name for Peter Gabriel's i/o album. (Yes, I would prefer both, but I know that Wikipedia is inconsistent and political and that's life; I'll revisit i/o later this month after the album is released and there are more sources.) But, you're basically arguing against a strawman. What I'm saying is that Wikipedia really should not assert that Adidas is right and adidas is wrong, merely a style, that I/O is right and i/o is wrong, merely a style, and that's what it is doing. You're an expert and you know that Wikipedia is simply using certain words and they don't mean what a casual reader would think they do. That's great for you, and you can cite as many policies as you can find to me, and it will still not make that 99.9% suddenly understand these statements differently. Wikipedia isn't only for people who know all the policies and guidelines. I wish you could understand that and support a change.

Let's end this. I will thank you again for helping me refine what I need to say. Sorry you don't see that either. Please think about the paragraph above (maybe reread it a few times) and let me know if you can support working towards better accuracy. Thanks.

RoyLeban (talk) 13:44, 2 December 2023 (UTC)

Exactly as I predicted, you won't respond substantively to any refutation, just engage in handwaving (like a pretense that an argument based on your idiolect definitions and religious-faith-style, assumptive-against-direct-evidence personal principle ideas, that "to ... 99.9% of visitors ... things [like "Adidas" instead of your preferred "adidas"] ... are not true" even after it is proved beyond any possible doubt that "adidas" is not what independent sources use) is somehow equivalent to an argument that is based on actual usage and our actual policies and guidelines and pracices, and then you circle back to re-re-re-re-reiterating the same position again as if it has not already been demonstrated faulty. "Wikipedia really should not assert that Adidas is right and adidas is wrong, merely a style" is simply counterfactual nonsense. This is the actual straw man in the room. Nowhere does "Wikipedia ... assert that adidas is wrong". But you refuse to understand or acknowledge this no matter how many times and in how many ways it is explained to you. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 00:04, 3 December 2023 (UTC)

(sigh) You're doing what you accuse me of doing and you're misquoting me. I didn't say that 99.9% of visitors use or prefer "adidas". I said they read what is on Wikipedia without knowing the policies and guidelines. That is an inescapable fact. We might argue about how they read things, but it is a fact that they don't know the policies or guidelines. They would likely be surprised or confused when you tell them that Wikipedia cares more about independent sources than what a person or company says is their name. I think that Wikipedia's phrasing tells somebody who doesn't know the policies and guidelines that "Adidas" is the company's name and thus right, and that "adidas" is merely a stylization, not actually the company's name, and thus wrong. It's possible I'm wrong, but my decades of work building user experiences tells me I'm not. I understand that you're a Wikipedia policy expert and think otherwise, but no amount of posturing or citing policies and guidelines that 99.9% of visitors have never seen is going to change what those people think.

I could do a point-by-point refutation of much of your argument above, but I am choosing not to. There's no point. It's not going to change your mind. (That said, perhaps do a bit more research into deadmau5 before you argue that 5 is a "stylization" of s; it is no more Deadmaus than "lieutenant" is a "stylization" of "leftenant" in England).

Remember when I mentioned "signing for natives" and you told me that the term I've been using and promoting for decades was wrong, based on a misunderstanding of what it meant and what signing and signposting mean? As I've said, I'm sorry you don't understand what I'm saying. I really wish you did, but I'm not going to try to explain it anymore. I'd like you to accept that I have understood everything you've written, I've learned from it, and I disagree.

Please agree to disagree. Thanks.

RoyLeban (talk) 11:36, 4 December 2023 (UTC)

Arbitrary break 2

"they read what is on Wikipedia without knowing the policies and guidelines": They read everything everywhere without knowing any publisher's internal rules and rationales, and they provably mostly encounter "Adidas" except in the company's own marketing materials.

"They would likely be surprised or confused when you tell them that Wikipedia cares more about independent sources than what a person or company says is their name." Well, "surprised" may be true (about trademarks; you're making suppositions about treatment of individuals' names on WP that aren't actually correct) and has always been true. Yet the policies and guidelines are the way they are, because consensus has concluded that it is more important to avoid undue stylization of trademarks and unnecessary divergence from consistency, that to please a few people by mimicking trademark stylization (at the cost of probably irritating more of them; many readers would be at least as "surprised" by us doing that when most other publishers don't, and we're even going the extra mile of making sure the reader know how the company prefers to style it, which virtually no other publisher would bother with). The same idea you have to mimic trademarks, with the same rationales you're bringing, has been articulated so many time before, with the same "nope" result, that it needs to be listed at WP:PERENNIAL.

"Wikipedia's phrasing tells somebody ... that 'Adidas' is the company's name and thus right, and that 'adidas' is merely a stylization, not actually the company's name, and thus wrong." Well, you can hold that belief all you want, but it doesn't seem to be shared by much of anyone, largely because it's a suppositional if-then chain that doesn't represent real-user thinking about material with a much more obvious interpretation (for multiple semantic reasons). It's just you looking for the worst possible interpretation and then imagining that it must be the only or the dominant interpretation when there is no evidence of this anywhere, and it's astronomically unlikely. This is called "terriblizing" and it's not rationally defensible. In reality, our material is telling people the company's name is "Adidas" which may be capitalized or not, and is more often capitalized (which is provably true) but that the the company prefers "adidas". Every reader of English is familiar with the fact that various terms may be capitalized by one writer yet not by another, without a change in meaning, and are familiar with this from the bare beginnings of their literacy, and have it reinforced everywhere every day. Only you are (or pose as) confused into thinking that "adidas" and "Adidas" are not the same name just styled differently. You are, or give the appearance of being, completely hung up on the idea that "name" is equivalent and only equivalent to "specific set of gylphs including capital versus lower-case letters". No one else is; it's like a badly-written bot's ultra-literal parsing. If there was actual evidence of regular confusion about this, we would have seen it and lots of it a long time ago and every day since then, but it is nowhere to be found.

When you were offered an entirely sensible compromise approach, namely a proposal to use other wording than "stylized as", you completely rejected it and reset right back at your position that the current practice is wrong and that the only way to fix is by mimicking the trademark stylizations, when this is clearly not the only fix at all (if anyone even agrees there's a problem). It's become clear that the only thing you'll be satisfied by is a WP policy to precisely mimic all trademarks no matter what. And that is never, ever going to happen.

Your UX experience is probably useful in a lot of ways here, but I also have that (I've been building the Web very nearly since it existed, including what was for several years between the third and fifth most-linked-to website in the world; my main line of work is as a web-dev consultant to this day). And we've both been here on WP for a very long time. Yet I have absorbed much more WP-specific UX and institutional memory about matters of this sort. Surely this is owing to my long participation in shepherding our style guidelines, versus your near absence from discussions about them. You've had a very long time to have your input on this when things were still in flux, and are now crying sour grapes that the results didn't magically turn out to reflect your too-late-stated preferences.

I didn't tell you "signing" was wrong, I said "singposting" would be clearer because of the ambiguity of "signing". You countered with a different ambiguity pertaining to "signposting", and I pointed out that it wasn't actually an ambiguity because your "for natives" principle applies to it inclusively. Why are we rehashing that?

Yes, agreeing to disagree is fine; I'm skeptical there's any choice because you will brook no comrompise on this, even when it's proposed in clear terms, would address your ostensible concern (it were really about reader understanding and not about slavish mimicking all trademarks), and would probably be accepted by consensus. That's on you. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 13:09, 4 December 2023 (UTC)

It looks like I'm triggering you. Sorry about that. It's also clear we're both a bit stubborn. I really would like this to stop because I've already learned as much as I can from this discussion, and yes, what I've learned will hopefully help me explain what Wikipedia should do to improve clarity and accuracy. But this isn't a good way to end it.

"Agreeing to disagree" isn't saying ok and then giving a long list of all the things I'm wrong about, misrepresenting what I've said, and using loaded words that reinforce how wrong I am. "Agreeing to disagree" is also not saying that I "dismissed" an "entirely sensible compromise approach" (using a different word) when I explained to you why it didn't solve the problem. And note that I told you I would think about your proposal, and I did. You also told me that you thought editors wouldn't accept the word "actually," and that is an example of something where what you've written will help me shape a future proposal (so sincere thanks).

Yes, I've made it clear that I would prefer that Wikipedia respect people and company's names (which you dismiss as an attempt at "mimicry"), but I've also made it clear that the most important thing to me is clarity and accuracy, and dropping the "respect" argument is a compromise on my part. It is reasonable to say that 95% of independent sources need to use a certain capitalization or set of glyphs in order for Wikipedia to use that particular "stylization", according to its style guidelines. But, it is not reasonable (and simply false) to say that if 95% of independent sources don't use that capitalization or set of glyphs, then the person's or company's name is actually not what they say it is. I hope you'll agree with that!

We can disagree on what the 99.9% of non-editors will think the words that Wikipedia uses in this context mean. But, absent an actual survey and/or analysis, you can't say I'm wrong. No such analysis has been done.

In the hope that this might finally help you understand what I'm saying, I want to point out your phrase "... how the company prefers to style it ..." — this is a pretty explicit statement that the company merely "prefers" a "stylization" and therefore the "stylization" is not actually the name. This is the problem! Rather than reflecting the world, as it is supposed to do, Wikipedia is making original statements on "stylization," based on its own Manual of Style, not either primary or secondary sources, and passing them off as facts. Wikipedia's rules don't change the world outside it.

Finally, please note that I have not given you a list of things you're wrong about (I wrote and deleted that). That's not what "agreeing to disagree" is about. You're entitled to your opinions. So am I.

Thanks.

RoyLeban (talk) 12:13, 5 December 2023 (UTC)

I don't really get "triggered", and have an unusual patience level for dealing with circular discussions if there is any chance of resolving them.

The compromise approach listed a bunch of alternatives, and was a general way to move forward, but you rejected the entire notion. If you believe basically that Wikipedia should always follow the stylization preferred by the trademark holder (an argument to follow a primary source at all costs, I have to observe), then there really isn't anything that's going to satisfy you other than that exact outcome. I don't see any point in now dancing around about the fact that you rejected a broad and reasonable compromise approach because it didn't give you everything you ultimately wished for (compromises never do). That's exactly what happened, and you're even reinforcing this by returning right back to "I would prefer that Wikipedia respect people and company's names" which is your odd way of saying to exactly copy their trademark rendering (mimic their stylization, but you seem not to like that phrase).

"I hope you'll agree with that!": Its such a confused construction, there's no way to agree or disagree with it. You continually conflate the concept "name" and "string of exact Unicode glyphs" and these are not the same thing. Feel free to cite a reliable source on proper names saying otherwise. It's a form of neologism, of inventing a new definition. There is nowhere, anywhere, on WP where WP is saying that company's name is not what it says it is. You're just making that up out of nowhere. Or more specifically out of a fantasy that if WP says "Adidas (stylized as adidas) is ..." then WP is saying that the company is lying that its name is "adidas" and that its name really is "Adidas" and that these are different names. WP is, of course, not saying anything like that, and we have no evidence that anyone on the planet other than you fails to understand that "Adidas" and "adidas" are two renderings of the same name, one preferred by the company and one preferred by everyday English writing norms in most or all of the sources we're citing. It really is that simple.

"you can't say I'm wrong. No such analysis has been done": I can, and it has. The very fact that our talk pages and our articles themselves and the ability to move most pages are all wide open, and many of our readers take their first editing steps to correct errors, yet they are not "correcting" these "errors" that you are so up in arms about, is solid proof that your premise has no basis. We have experience all day every day of what readers understand and fail to understand, what they accept and what they object to. "Adidas (stylized adidas)" is not something they fail to understand or that they object to, or they would say and often directly do something about it regularly, and we would notice.

I understand exactly what you are saying. You have it in your head that Wikipedia using "stylized as" or (given that you rejected the entire notion of any compromise of this sort) "styled as", "presented as", "represented as", "rendered as", etc., is a declaration of some sort about the reality or legitimacy or factuality of one version versus the other. But it is nothing of the sort, and everyone knows that. I think even you do, but for some reason you've picked this false dichotomy hill to die on. What it is, is WP writing the way WP writes (based on source usage), and noting parenthetically that the trademark holder writes a different way. That's it, the end. We didn't even have to go that far, and most publishers do not. And we don't do it for the trademark holder's benefit, we do it just so the reader is certain they're at the right page.

And "based on ... not ... secondary sources" is of course not the case, since the very way we arrive at a decision to have the article title be ASAP Rocky with "stylized as 'A$AP Rocky'" in that case, but in another case have the article at tvOS instead of "TVOS" or "tvOS" or "TvOS" or whatever, is what the vast majority of secondary sources are doing. (In fairness, perhaps you meant by "secondary sources" here that there aren't secondary sources saying that "adidas" is wrong or an error or a lie, but Wikipedia of course isn't saying that either, so there is no claim WP is making for which such a source could possibly be needed. And even if there were such a source available making such claims about a particular trademark, WP would only cite it as opinion with due weight, if at all. I'm not aware of any real-world dispute about what a company's name actually is, much less one we have article material about. This simply doesn't come up.)

"Wikipedia's rules don't change the world outside it." As a general matter, sure. But that doesn't seem particularly pertinent. In the real word, "Adidas" clearly dominates, and it's not because WP said so (it's been that way since long before WP existed [6]). And WP using it, both following our own house style and acknowledging it is the typical rendering despite the company preferring "adidas", is unlikely to affect the company's preferences at all (though companies change such stylizations all the time, to "mix it up" with their marketing), nor to change any other publisher's house style to either ignore or copy that particular trademark's styling.

If you really want to go to war against MOS:TM and WP:OFFICIALNAME, I can't stop you. But I've given you carefully considered and WP-experience-based reasoning why it will be a waste of time. This long argument has arguably been a waste ot time, but at least it's just been that of just two editors (and any WP:JAGUAR bored enough to read it!) rather than all the people watchlisting a guideline talk page and all the people who'd be notified of a [doomed] RfC. (Meanwhile, one to simply stop using the exact phrase "stylized as", or to at least provide it only as one of several examples, would be pretty likely to succeed.) — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 13:48, 5 December 2023 (UTC)

I was not expecting to continue this here. You keep stating your opinions as if they are facts and you keep saying my opinions are wrong. No matter how many people have an opinion, it doesn't make it a fact. No matter how few people have an opinion, it doesn't make it wrong.

You are conflating two things.

First, yes, I do believe that Wikipedia should use the names that people and companies choose (when you call it a "stylization" you are loading the discussion to imply that my point of view is wrong). But, and I keep saying this and you keep ignoring it, I respect WIkipedia's right to have it's style guidelines and rules. Thus, it can use Adidas instead of adidas because third parties (not adidas themselves) use an uppercase A, while it uses iPhone and not Iphone because third parties (again, not Apple themselves) spell it as iPhone. Yes, I'm frustrated that Wikipedia's guidelines clearly state that primary sources may be used for statements of fact yet it has been determined that something as fundamental as a person's or company's name is not considered to be a statement of fact, and I think that is inconsistent (and, yes, I know Wikipedia has many inconsistencies and contradictions).

In this matter, the following is very important and undeniably true: Using Adidas instead of adidas and iPhone instead of Iphone is neither right nor wrong. It is Wikipedia's choice, Wikipedia's chosen style according to its Manual of Style. Deciding that names are not facts, by Wikipedia's usage of those words, is also Wikipedia's choice. I don't have to agree with these things, I don't have to like them, I can believe that it should be otherwise, and I'm allowed to have my preferences, just as any editor is so allowed. My opinion, by definition, is not wrong. But I accept these things I don't like, and I have said so repeatedly. So, please, stop bringing this up!

Second, there is the matter of accuracy and sourcing, and Wikipedia is not being accurate and it is saying things that are not sourced. Let's talk about specific points you've made:

You said there has been an analysis made of how the 99.9% of visitors (not editors) interpret phrases such as "stylized as". I don't believe you. Can you link to an independent article (not a Wikipedia talk page) which contains such an analysis? Editors having a discussion is not the same thing as an actual analysis. Our discussion is not an analysis. A real analysis would involve actual research, data collection, and analysis of that data. You are arguing that the absence of visitors saying they're misinterpreting something proves that they're not misinterpreting it. Ignoring the fact that people don't know what they don't know, almost every visitor to Wikipedia doesn't edit, doesn't comment, doesn't object to anything. You can't read anything into that! The fact is we both have opinions, and neither of us can say the other is absolutely wrong. I guarantee you I'm not the only person on the planet who thinks this phrasing is bad and that "everyone" doesn't know otherwise.

So, let's talk about phrasing such as: "Adidas ... (... stylized in all lowercase since 1949)[4]". I included the footnote because the citation is not a source for this phrasing. Quite the opposite. It says "On this day in 1949, Adi Dassler registered his new shoe-making company, “adidas,” a simple, lowercase portmanteau of his shortened first and last names. The uncomplicated business name may have pointed toward the current frame of mind of its founder: adidas was unmistakably Adi’s; no questions asked, now please move along. Perhaps the lowercase “a” hinted at some form of passivity, a desire to not be too noticed. Adi, you see, had been through some drama, and he was looking for a fresh start." This article says that, from the beginning, the company's name was adidas. in the interest of complete accuracy, I'll point out that the article does say "...now with a capital “A”..." in 1954, but the article doesn't say anything about how that became lowercase "adidas" again after that. It's also unclear if this statement is literal or literary license on the part of the writer. In any event, the article does not support the phrasing "stylized as" — that statement appears to be made up by Wikipedia editors, here and in almost every other case. Wikipedia insists on sources and citations for even trivial things that are obvious to everyone. Yet not for this?

So what is the solution? To summarize: I proposed "actually" and you pointed out that it simply won't be accepted. You're probably right. You suggested replacing "stylized" with another word like "rendered" or "presented" but that doesn't change anything. It just provides a different word to be misinterpreted. Of course, in some cases, a word such as "stylized" or "presented" is accurate.

So how about this? The fact is that the company says "adidas" while Wikipedia says "Adidas". Can we reflect a fact like that without interjecting an opinion? What do you think of recommending that no phrase be used absent a source or a clear indication of the stylization, presentation, etc., and that when there is such an indication, the most appropriate phrasing (e.g., "stylized as", "presented as") be used. An example of a clear stylization would be Se7en, where the studio used/uses "Seven", "seven", and "SE7EN" in different situations.

RoyLeban (talk) 12:57, 10 December 2023 (UTC)

I actually responded to this top-downward, but going over the issues I have with "close to all of the sentences that led up to this proposal", as I put it below, might be of low interest, so I'll just collapse-box it. I haven't proofed it, so there will likely be typoeses and some repetitive redundancy that could be removed and deleted.

Detailed response

"First, yes, I do believe that Wikipedia should use the names that people and companies choose": That really could simply have been the end of this. So could "Using Adidas instead of adidas and iPhone instead of Iphone is neither right nor wrong. It is Wikipedia's choice, Wikipedia's chosen style according to its Manual of Style." But you're clearly not going to budge from your stance despite saying that. You almost got it, so close with "neither right nor wrong" and "Wikipedia's chosen style according to its Manual". But then here we go again: "the following is very important and undeniably true ... Deciding that names are not facts, by Wikipedia's usage of those words, is also Wikipedia's choice". And again: "Wikipedia is not being accurate and it is saying things that are not sourced". That is all you still reverting right back to your idiolect ideas and trying to impose them on the world and on WP. In no way is WP saying that "Adidas" is a fact (is correct, is right, is true, is reality, whatever version you want to inject next) but that "adidas" is not a fact, is wrong, is false, is untrue, is a lie, is fiction, is unreality. Your idea of what "name" and "fact" means does not agree with anyone else's, and you just can't get over this idea that the same name being styled multiple ways somehow is an assertion that one version is "a fact" and the other is not, and further than not using the trademark holder's version is somehow a falsehood or a claim that the trademark holder is engaging in a falsehood.

I challenge you to find any reliable sources whatsoever (e.g. cross-disciplinary scholarly works on proper naming in linguistics and philosophy) that support your idiosyncratic interpretations of what WP is doing and what WP means when it says "Adidas (stylized as adidas) is ...". There is no question in anyone's mind, so far as we have any evidence of any kind over 20+ years, that this means to anyone (except you) anything other than what it's obviously intended to mean: "Adidas (the title we arrived at because it's the commonly used spelling in the sources, which is how we title every article, and how pretty much everyone else writes, too), stylized as adidas (in the company's own marketing materials, though hardly anyone writes it this way but them and vendors they have a distribution deal with), is ...". Your fantasy that readers are coming here expecting to find adidas as the style we use for this name is not supportable, specifically because nearly no one else writing about this company and product line spells it that way (with only rare exceptions), aside from non-independent sources doing it (and not all of them) to keep the company happy. There is no lack of sourcing that the company styles its trademark as "adidas" and that it is more usually written "Adidas" by independent sources. There is no making a reality/truth claim by Wikipedia at all, so there is no possiblility that WP is making one that is unsourced. But you seem utterly unwilling to accept this and at least feigning an inability to even understand it.

I strongly suspect this will continue to be a circular waste of time, but I will go ahead and try one more time and address all the rest of this.

"when you call it a 'stylization' you are loading the discussion to imply that my point of view is wrong": Nope, I'm using the standardized wording that WP uses: "stylized as f0o". And multiple times now I've explicitly equated what I meant by that to what you meant in your own terms, and even switched to using your terms more than once, just to avoid you trying to bring up this hand-wave again, yet here you are doing it yet again. How many times does it have to be dismissed before you stop doing it? More substantively, I offered to try to negotiate (by RfC if necessary) a change to this "stylized as f0o" wording, but you rejected any such compromise. My working hypothesis is that its because it would conflict with your consistent habit of trying to cast WP's wording as a terrible wrong that must be corrected at all costs; if we used more, I dunno what to call it, sensitive wording, like "rendered as", "represented as", etc., then you'd have much less of a WP:GREATWRONG to go polemical about.

"You keep stating your opinions as if they are facts and you keep saying my opinions are wrong": If every argument to you is simply "an opinion", all equal, that's not how things actually work. What I'm telling you is based on facts: how WP operates; what has happened before in the many times your idea has been argued in the past and why that argument always fails; what our P&G actually say and mean and why they do so; what the everyday definitions of words like name and style and fact are, what the more specific meanings of name are in linguististics and in philosophy, what the broad meaning of style is in the context of a style manual and of writing natural language; and many other such points. What you are saying is based on prescriptive and brow-beating ideals of Truth and Rightness and Honor and Respect and what is Fundamental, that you just invented out of your own head. To come at this from a different angle: even if we want to classify every utterance by both of us as "just an opinion", not all opinions are equal. If your opinion is that space aliens probably do not exist (at least anywhere near earth), based on all the available scientific evidence that we have, and my opinion is that space aliens are among us because my cousin says he was abducted by them and got an anal probe, the average onlooker knows to take your opinion more seriously. "My opinion, by definition, is not wrong.": There is no definition of "opinion" under which an opinion cannot be wrong (for mutiple senses of wrong). If my opinion where that everyone who is an [insert ethnic or religious group here] should be killed, that opinion would be ethically and (under most but not all moral systems) morally wrong. If it were that the sun would not rise tomorrow, that would be statistically wrong. If it were that the earth is flat, that would be factually wrong, according to all the evidence we have. And so on.

Nothing is going to change or dodge this core fact: WP has a very, very solid consensus – on any and all style matters – to not diverge from the style set by MoS for any case unless – in that specific case, like a specific album, not a general category of potential cases like "albums" – independent reliable sources overwhelmingly (in practice: about 90+%) prefer the stylized "official" version.

"I'm frustrated that Wikipedia's guidelines clearly state that primary sources may be used for statements of fact yet it has been determined that something as fundamental as a person's or company's name is not considered to be a statement of fact, and I think that is inconsistent": The point you are missing in WP:ABOUTSELF, and which is a third point that should really just completely end all of this right now: Self-published ... sources may be used as sources of information about themselves, usually in articles about themselves or their activities, ... so long as the material is neither unduly self-serving nor an exceptional claim. [The rest of the section is not relevant here]. There is already a strong consensus that trademark stylizations are WP:UNDUE and self-serving in almost all cases. The only time there is an exception is when independent reliable sources nearly universally go along with it. "Our product name must be spelled 'xYz'" is ultimately "an exceptional claim" and if indy sources do not go along with it, then WP can't either. To put it another way, our dearest maxim is "Follow the sources." That doesn't mean primary sources. ABOUTSELF cannot be used to contradict the preponderance of reliable secondary sources; there is a consensus that this applies to style matters, too. This consensus is the basis of all of MOS:TM and many other MoS provisions, of WP:OFFICIALNAME (not tagged as a guideline but in community practice has the force of one like WP:BRD and WP:AADD), even in a more general way of WP:COMMONNAME policy.

Aside: throwing "fundamental" in there just goes the extra mile to demonstrate that this is a GREATWRONGS / WP:ADVOCACY / WP:ACTIVISM position you have a wild hare about. It simply is not possible for stylistic rendering of a name of something to be "fundamental" when nearly none of the indy RS "obey" it. By definition. This, incidentally, is exactly why COMMONNAME has no style-specific provisions in it at all, and every attempt to shoehorn them in it or anywhere else in WP:AT policy (and there have been many tries) has failed.

"You said there has been an analysis made of how the 99.9% of visitors (not editors) interpret phrases such as 'stylized as'": I guess I was being too subtle. What I indicated, at some length, is that WP being extremly (like, more than any other publisher in the whole world) open to complaint and to users just directly changing anything the don't like, yet not regularly being changed or complained at in the direction that would suit you, proves adequately that readers are not in any way confused into the nonsense belief that Wikipedia claims adidas is a falsehood and that the company is really and truly named Adidas with and only with a capital A and they are lying about their name. The fact that you want to continue arguing this silliness and pretending that you can't understand my meaning is a bad sign. "You can't read anything into that!": We certainly can, and do, and must. Everything about this project that is not dictated directly by policy is determined by consensus, which is formed largely on the basis of [aside from reliable sources on a topic, in a content dispute] direct feedback from users, including many anonymous readers. Our daily reliance on public feedback does in fact constitute a form of analysis of how they use and interpret the site, whether you like to accept that or not.

And every editor with an account or regularly editing as still an anon is also still a member of the reader pool and of course originated within it. You're conceptualizing of editors as a separate class, but they are a subset, and statistically very meaningful. If the vast majority of our readers-who-are-also-editors agree, e.g., that various kinds of phrasing as listed at MOS:WTW are typically problematic for WP:NPOV reasons and mostly should not be used in wiki-voice except some of them under specific overwhelming-sources conditions, then we can be rather certain that the readership as a whole would also feel this way (in less specific terms, since they don't know "MOS:WTW" or "WP:NPOV", they just know skewed writing when they see it), since our readers-who-are-editors are a rather randomized sample of all readers. Our editors are not, say, all from London, or all bisexual, or all Hispanic, or all 18–25. To the extent there might be some kinds of skew (perhaps bulges of teens and of retirees when it comes to very active editors, owing to career-age people having paid work to keep them more occupied) this doesn't magically translate into an ability of the editing subset of readers to understand what "stylized as f0o" means while the larger set will fail to understand it and walk way with your wholly invented idea that it means WP is asserting that the trademark is some form of fakery.

To try a different tack: "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary sources", and your entire set of notions about all of this are very, very extraordinary claims, from the meaning of "name" and "fact" and "style", to what WP is doing and how it relates to reliable sourcing, to your hypothesis that the meaning of "stylized as f0o" in the mind of the reader is necessarily or likely to coincide with your personal one. There simply is not evidence of any kind, anywhere, for a single point of your stance on this. "neither of us can say the other is absolutely wrong": I can say your position on this is wrong, in multiple ways, because I have facts (both internal and external), well-defended reasoning, and a 20+ years of the community absorbing input from its readership to back me up, along with the same time-span of consensus against your stance, while you have nothing at all other than philosophizing notions you invented, and assumptions based on them.

"the citation is not a source for this phrasing": It absolutely is a source for that phrasing, under conventional definitions (i.e. dictionary sourceable, without going into obscure materials using meaning the average reader could not be expected to know or apply) of "name" and "style/stylize". It only fails as a source for your idiolect-based notion that "WP is saying that 'Adidas' is the real/true/correct name and that 'adidas' is an unreal/false/incorrect change to it". Since there is no actual connection of any kind between what WP is actually doing/saying and what you fantasize that it means, much less a connection between what readers get from this and what you get (or pretend to get from it individually) there is no sourcing problem here. And again, you were offered a compromise on this particular wording and would have none of it, so it is hard to take any of this at face value, especially when you've repeatedly made it clear that the only way to satisfy you is for WP to always style trademarks exactly as they are styled by the trademark holder.

"the [external] article does say '...now with a capital "A"...' in 1954, but the article doesn't say anything about how that became lowercase 'adidas' again after that": Could be a matter for more research, but there is a consensus (I forget where it is documented) to not create "logo galleries", and the same reasoning probably applies here, rooted in WP:NOT#INDISCRIMINATE: it probably is not encycopedic information to dwell on tiny details of wordmark changes and when they occurred. We don't seem to be doing this in any well-developed articles on companies and products of any kind; we cover major name changes, especially those that would result in a distinctly different name that would be a different search term and lead to the article by redirect. We tend not to cover changes to graphical logo and other branding matters either. "It's also unclear if this statement is literal or literary license on the part of the writer." This is an even stronger argument against including such material, as it may be WP:UNDUE dwelling on opinion material, and so unclear as to meaning to constitute WP:OR for us to imply a particular interpretation.

"the [external] article does not support the phrasing 'stylized as'": Been over this several times already. Of course it does, for any definition of name and style/stylized other than your idiolect ones. "that statement appears to be made up by Wikipedia editors, here and in almost every other case." WP:OWNWORDS: Summarize source material in your own words as much as possible. For every sensible definition of these ideas, it is a perfectly good summary of this evidence and of virtually all other evidence in all other case, that the name is stylized a particular way by the trademark holder. (In this specific case, the evidence is even more on our side than usual, since the company has actually officially used both spellings at different time periods.)

"You suggested replacing 'stylized' with another word like 'rendered' or 'presented' but that doesn't change anything. It just provides a different word to be misinterpreted." So, we're right back to you rejecting all attempts at compromise, for indefensible "in my own imagination" reasons backed up by nothing whatsoever, and again I'm pretty sure it's because accepting any such shift in the wording would undermine your idea that you're some day going to force Wikipedia to "obey" all trademark style. Never going to happen.

"The fact is that the company says 'adidas' while Wikipedia says 'Adidas'." That is not the fact, and you misunderding this (or feigning misunderstanding of it – this more and more looking performative) is the entire root of the problem. The actual fact is that the company uses 'adidas' and virtually everyone with no direct fiduciary connection to the company uses 'Adidas'. WP didn't make this up, we are following the independent sources. This point has been made to you dozens of times, yet you somehow "miss" it every single time. This is the very definition of WP:ICANTHEARYOU antics. "Can we reflect a fact like that without interjecting an opinion?" No "opinion" is being injected. You claim that it seems like an opinion to you, only because you've made up in your own mind neologistic, idiosyncratic definitions of all the key terms at play, from "name" to "true" to "meaning" to "style/stylize" to "opinion". There is zero evidence of any kind anywhere that anyone else on earth agrees with your definitions, and the idea that the bulk of our readers are coming here with them in mind is the most extraordinary claim I've ever seen in my 18 years on Wikipedia.

"An example of a clear stylization would be Se7en, where the studio used/uses [variants]". And we already have similar proof for your apparently poorly cherry-picked "poster child" Adidas. This is hair-splitting over trivia that has no business being in an encyclopedia article, and our editors should not be trying to research utterly unimportant questions of exactly which spellings were used when and where for what purpose, any more than we should be deeply analyzing changes over time to graphical logos (people have tried that before, and it's been deleted). It's just wholly inconsequential, INDISCRIMINATE trivia. If you personally want to go about this "research", I guess no one can stop you, but a) I would expect most of it to get reverted as unencyclopedic and UNDUE trivia-mongering (leaning toward the same kind of problem editing countermanded at WP:LOGOS#Advertisements, just about wordmarks instead of graphical logos), and b) please think really hard about the fact that your lifespan is finite. Too much of your time and mine has already been wasted on this quixotic pursuit of yours.

— SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 16:44, 10 December 2023 (UTC)

Arbitrary break 3

So ...

I/O (i/o)
Alien 3 (Alien³)
Rakim Athelaston Mayers (born October 3, 1988), known professionally as ASAP Rocky or A$AP Rocky (/ˈeɪsæp/ AY-sap)
eBay Inc. (/ˈiːbeɪ/ EE-bay, often ebay)
Craigslist (craigslist)
Artpop (ARTPOP)

but

Seven (shown as SE7EN in the movie's title sequence and some promotional materials)
Pyrex (trademarked as PYREX and pyrex)
Macy's (originally R. H. Macy & Co. and sometimes stylized as Macy*s)

Could you support this or some version of it? RoyLeban (talk) 12:57, 10 December 2023 (UTC)

I disagree, substantively, with close to all of the sentences that led up to this proposal, but the proposal itself might be worth considering, from a concision perspective. I would also run with my own idea of permitting multiple phrasings like "presented as", "marketed as", or whatever as an alternative proposal.

Issues I can see with your "usually say nothing" approach is that it will be unclear to many readers why there is a different spelling presented in parentheses. And some of the specific examples aren't good. E.g., Macy's is not stylized as "Macy*s" (by the company or by reliable sources); rather, their logo can be somewhat approximated as "macy^★s", but previous edits to that effect at that article have been reverted as basically a form of trivial WP:OR. The i/o case might actually end up at that name, depending on what RS do after the album release. The claim "often ebay" is actually dubious, and appears to be more mimicry of a graphical logo; I don't see this version in RS much at all and the subject doesn't itself use that. "Trademarked as PYREX and pyrex" is arguably unnecessarily specific (though some might argue it is "precise"). Artpop's "ARTPOP" is just a stylization; it may be one Gaga uses consistently, but it's pure "marketing caps" and is masquerading as a acronym but is not one. Not an example I would fight hard about when it comes to this proposed wording, though.

I would predict that this proposal would not be well supported, for multiple reasons: 1) because your rationales for are is based on neologistic definitions of words like "name", "true", "meaning", "real", "fact", "opinion", "fundamental", etc., that do not agree with conventional meanings found in dictionaries and thus do not agree with reader expectations; 2) the proposal does not address any demonstrable problem we have any evidence of whatsoever, only a WP:GREATWRONGS-leaning notion in your own head ("not broke, don't fix it"); 3) because the inclarity to the average reader about what a bare "Artpop (ARTPOP)" is trying to imply is necessarily going to outweigh the alleged but phantasmal inclarity of "Artpop (stylized as ARTPOP)", or some similar explanatory construction, to an imaginary class of readers who have somehow arrived at your peculiar definitions; and 4) though concision is generally a virtue, mandating this level of concision (which this proposal kind of defeats itself at, with long-winded examples like Mayers, Seven, and Pyrex) won't sit well with other editors to begin with. If editorial discretion has collectively come to a 20+ year consensus that being a little explanatory about this stuff is the better way to write, then that consensus is unlikely to change.

My alternative idea, of advising several different kinds of explanatory phrases as examples, would be more apt to gain consensus, because "stylized" might not be the best term, at least not all the time, and only using that one term is overly restrictive. Given that your own draft above includes 5 out of 9 examples having explanatory phrases, well, I think you see where this is going. If editors have a choice between a restrictive option with complicated and undemonstrable rationales (the examples for which aren't consistent with its own goal), and a flexible one with a simple rationale anyone is apt to agree with, they're likely to pick the latter. What's even more likely is a "no change" result, because the community is resistant to WP:CREEP and especially WP:MOSBLOAT in particular. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 16:44, 10 December 2023 (UTC)

Real name

I just want to say that I appreciate that you, like me, use your real name on Wikipedia. I think anonymity leads to a lot of bad behavior — people are, in fact, jerks. The fact that you use your real name makes me trust you more. I think (hope) we want the same thing on the Trademarks guideline. As I said, it wasn't directly related to the i/o issue, just noticed when I was looking at the guideline. I routinely reread guidelines when people refer to them because I can't memorize them all. And, it clearly doesn't reflect what actually happens, which is a problem. Fixing that and possibly changing the policy slightly with respect to how to respect names chosen by owners and creators are two independent issues. Let's keep the heat down on both discussions. RoyLeban (talk) 01:56, 24 October 2023 (UTC)

@RoyLeban:Keeping the heat down is good. So please try to interpret all this as constructive not as argumentation for its own sake. I think you are misreading the situation, processually speaking. The guideline wording is guideline wording, not an iron-clad policy. From WP:P&G: "guidelines are generally meant to be best practices for following [policy] standards in specific contexts. Policies and guidelines should always be applied using reason and common sense. ... Guidelines are sets of best practices supported by consensus. Editors should attempt to follow guidelines, though they are best treated with common sense, and occasional exceptions may apply." Because exceptions can and thus sometimes will apply, it is not possible for guideline wording to obviate all exceptions, yet you seem to be looking to do that (either to prevent exceptions from happening or to change the guideline wording to account for every kind of exception that's ever happened). The fact is that, because there can be exceptiosn to guidelines, it does not matter at all that you can find some exceptions is practice to this guideline. Such exceptions are expected and natural. So, there is no pressure or rush to change the guideline text to account for exceptions. We sometime do it anyway, when the exception type is frequent and the exception applies as a class. But "all trademarks that start with a string of one or more lower-case letters in their 'official' renderings" is the class, and it is not a class to which a blanket exception applies at all. Such trademarks are handled case-by-case, and in most cases the result is to write it witout the stylization. Instances like eBay, tvOS, iPhone are rare, not a norm here.

"[C]hanging the policy slightly with respect to how to respect names chosen by owners and creators" is, as you say, a separate matter, and a highly contentious one on which I predict you will gain no traction at all (starting with your use of the word "how" instead of "whether"), because it would obviously throw open the floodgate of demands for Wikipedia to bend over backwards to "obey" trademark holders and other entities (government agencies, etc.) on "official" stylizations of all sorts. (And the policy standards, to use P&G's wording, that are at issue with that are primarily WP:NPOV and WP:COI and WP:NOT: WP does not exist as a promotion mechanism, and that includes by doing aggrandizing or otherwise visually very differentiating things with text to make a particular product or service stand out to the reader.) As you said yourself, there is nothing "magically special" about trademarks that start lowercase, so we're not going to treat them as magically special.

All that said, the extant wording in the guideline about lowercase-starting trademarks is something of a palimpsest of people trying in piecemeal fashion over the years to account for prior exception-making (it is in fact a great example of why we should usually not do that at all), and it has not been collectively written well. This is why I suggested (at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Trademarks#A completely different idea: just nuke the lowercase section) replacing it entirely with more general language that speaks to our handling of trademark stylization across the board, because there really isn't anything magically special about ones that start lowercase. PS: As I've tried to indicate over at WT:MOS, trying to nitpick to death, with definitional distractions about "names" versus "trademarks" versus "stylizations", the only proposal that is going to go anywhere toward addressing what you want to address is counterproductive. When someone offers you a hand, don't spit on it (unless you're from Arrakis).
— SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 10:08, 24 October 2023 (UTC)

(I didn't really mean to move this discussion here, but perhaps it is useful to continue.)

Wikipedia has lots of fundamental problems. It's the best encyclopedia because it's the only one left. But it has always been hurt by politics. It's sad. In the case of guidelines, I have seen over and over again that people act as if they are hard and fast rules when they agree with them, or they support a point they want to make, and they treat them like mere guidelines when they disagree with them. I'm not suggesting you're doing that.

You don't like macOS as an example. I think it's a great example precisely because Apple has changed how it is written over time and Wikipedia is respecting that (as it should, in my opinion). MacOS 8 is correct, as is macOS Sonoma (and also System 7, from before it was called MacOS/macOS).

You misinterpreted my statement about lowercase names not being magically special — we are treating them specially, and I think we shouldn't. iPhone is iPhone, tvOS is tvOS, but iphone would be Iphone. Why? I don't see a justification other than some people's discomfort with lowercase letters. Following the guideline literally, i/o should be the bizarre I/o, yet some people believe it should be I/O and that's what is in the page now, despite almost universal agreement in the sources that it is i/o. Again, why? (but the bigger question, like I said, is clarity.)

I also think there are two fundamental questions.

There are logos, trademarks, and names. I don't care about logos. They're images. We put them in infoboxes. I also don't care if logos happen to be cased differently than the company normally uses the name (e.g., apple, amazon, NIKE, VERIZON, etc.). Trademarks matter more, but I don't disagree that WP isn't about promotion. What I care about is names. The name of the iPhone isn't Iphone. Apple's name isn't apple, despite their logo. But i/o is a name or title, not a trademark (in fact, titles of works generally can't be trademarked). The guideline has conflated names and trademarks and some people have tossed logos in too. Is it possible to separate those? Related point: Why are LeVar burton and bell hooks properly cased but other people aren't? (side note: I do stylize my name as "roy" and "/Roy" and I used to stylize my full name as "roy.leban" but I never said those were my name; there's a difference.)
Is the proper presentation of a name a fact? I think it is. WP says primary sources are ok for facts. Why doesn't that apply? Similarly, your name is Stanton, not Stan. I don't need to find a secondary source for me to believe what you have in your LinkedIn profile. And calling you Stan, unless you're ok with it, would be disrespectful. (side note: we have an interesting set of mutual connections on LinkedIn; I've known most of those folks for 30+ years)

I'd love it if some progress could be made here. Perhaps just having a /Names section of WP:MOS to start? RoyLeban (talk) 09:04, 25 October 2023 (UTC)

Your raising a big point about me using my real name was a major red flag to begin with, which I chose not to comment on at the time. But going around looking me up on LinkedIn and whatnot is downright creepy. I have no idea whether you're trying to bend me to your position by appealing to some sense of imagined special commonality and off-site connection, or implying that you're in a position to try to make my life more difficult if you don't get your way. It's inappropropriate no matter what it is.

To get back to the main topic: You're just reiterating your exact same position, without any modification at all, no matter what is said and shown to you. This is argumentum ad nauseam and proof by assertion, and I don't have any patience for it. Of course Wikipedia has a some issues and problems; it's run by humans, so that is a necessary consequence. That fact that we're not stylzing a few trademarks exactly the way you want to stylize them is not one of those problems, except to you and probably to a vanishingly small number of other editors in a handful of camps with WP:SSF style hobgoblins. If the editorship at large agreed with you that there was a problem here, the guideline could not have stably said what it has said for years, and would not be used on a daily basis at WP:RM with consistent results against WP mimicking trademark stylizations. As has already been made very clear to you, repeatedly, the guidelines already permit occasional exceptions; if consensus comes to a conclusion to render "i/o" as "i/o", then it does, and that would be fine. But so far it has not, and you can't end-run your way around that by trying to change the guideline in ways other editors do not accept. Your entire premise that the guideline is somehow broken because exceptions exist is simply wrongheaded. It's a failure to understand what guidelines are (including their limitations) and how they interoperate with policy and consensus.

Your understanding of what "trademark", "name", and "logo" mean is simply faulty. I verge on being a subject-matter expert in this area, and you are simply wrong about it, whether you want to absorb that or not. I really can't think of a "nice" way to put that. It just is as it is. "[T]itles of works generally can't be trademarked" is legally flat-out wrong, absolutely, and even people with no legal background at all usually already know that. Your understanding of what "name" means agrees neither with linguistic nor philosophy definitions of the term (the only ones with any currency; and of the two, the only one that MoS and WP care about in the slightest is the linguistic meaning). And a logo is not a graphic (our own article about this at Logo is wrong, as are many of our articles about many things). A logo is often represented in the form of a graphic, but it need not be in many cases (a vast number of them, called wordmarks, can simply be defined by typeface). "Is the proper presentation of a name a fact?" doesn't make any linguistic or conceptual sense. The entire notion of "proper" in such a sense is completely subjective opinion, so is outside the range of the factual. No one and nothing but a consensus of WP's editors determines what is "proper presentation" on Wikipedia. You have no idea whether my name is also "Stan" or not, so it is pointless to try to build an argument around a wild assumption about that.

To sum up, none of this browbeating insistence on your part about distinctions that can be drawn between "names" and "logos" and "trademarks" and "stylizations" has any import of any kind for MOS:TM. It was already written to account for all of that, and what we care about is stylization of text in our encyclopedia – at all – to mimic the unusual appearance favored by a trademark holder (or analogous party, such as a government agency), and we have no concern at all for whether the origin of that stylization is, in some strict definition or another, a trademark, a wordmark, a servicemark, a logo, a stylization just for the hell of it (as is the case with rendering of creator name and title on the typical album or book cover), or an assertion by the trademark holder about what their "name" "really" "is". It's all unencyclopedic futzing around with text to draw visual attention to a particular party (or offering thereof), and we do not permit it except in the very rare instance that rendering it that particular way is nearly universal in reliable sources independent of the subject. No amount of repetitive argument on your part is ever going to change this. (And it actually has nothing at all to do with lowercase letters in particular, but also applies to unusual uppercasing, character substitutions, etc.) Please let this be the end of it. I don't want to keep having this circular conversation indefinitely.

— SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 12:39, 25 October 2023 (UTC)

Sorry! I certainly didn't mean to be creepy. Your user page is what told me you used your real name. I thought I might use your real name as an example and that led me to LinkedIn, then I thought our connections were interesting. I didn't have an ulterior motive, and I am absolutely ok if people look me up. But, still, I appreciate you calling me out instead of just being annoyed silently, and you have my apologies. And, you're right, I don't know if you go by "Stan" or if you prefer it, but what I do know is that, absent something that tells me you do, it is not up to me (or anybody else) to decide for you. Here on Wikipedia, I know you have chosen SMcCandlish, so, absent some statement from you otherwise, that's how I will address you and refer to you here.

I don't think my understanding of trademarks, names, and logos is faulty. I'm somewhat of a subject matter expert on this, too, though perhaps not on Wikipedia's use of those words. (Among other things, I've been designing logos as a side "hobby" for 40 years.) I think you'd agree that bell hooks is a name, not a trademark or a logo, yet the Trademarks guideline seems to be applicable to such names. Why?

With regard to whether you can trademark a title, you might want to check with the USPTO, which says otherwise. Trademark holders work around this limitation by simultaneous selling goods which use the same name as their title or part of it. Thus, Harry Potter is a trademark but Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone is not. I don't know about other countries.

You're right that a logo is not specifically a graphic, but nor is it plain text. It is graphical in nature (Merriam-Webster; Chambers), even if that nature is derived merely from the use of a specific font. The SONY logo is such a font-derived graphical logo. The Logo page isn't so bad. The Wordmark page has issues and basically has no sources, though it does properly point out the legal meaning of "word mark" in the US (with a link to a page that doesn't have the term on it, which I'll fix).

We're going to have to agree to disagree on a number of other things. That doesn't mean I'll stop working to improve Wikipedia. RoyLeban (talk) 10:04, 26 October 2023 (UTC)

@RoyLeban:This will be long, since there are a lot of sub-subjects to cover. Thank you, and I hope that didn't come off as unreasonably alarmist, but you may be unaware of the long and sordid history of cyber-stalking and e-harassment of Wikipedia editors (especially those who use their real names). It's something you might actually want to consider; lots of people here start out using real names then quickly switch to a pseudonym. (I don't mainly because virtually all of my "real-life" work for clients is covered by NDAs, so it really is not possible for a would-be harasser to try to mess with my livelihood. No one can "contact my boss". But I know other editors here that this has happened to, including one who got fired for something they'd been working on here.) See also the WP:OUTING policy (which is way stricter than many would think. WP verges on paranoid when it comes to tying WP editors to "real lives". As for the "Stan" point, it didn't seem relevant to me. This discussion hasn't been about whether to call what is presently "macOS" just "mac" or "mcOS". Abbreviating a name (trademarked or not) is not stylizing it (and we already have a guideline, part of MOS:ABBR, against editors making up their own novel abbreviations of things; it's a form of WP:OR). What this has been about is whether if I say that I go by "sT@Nt0И" now, and I end up notable, does Wikipedia have to stylize it that way when they create the article about me, just because I've said it's my "official" spelling. The answer is "no", unless a very strong preponderance of sources independent of me spell it that way. (And this reminds me of a certain South Park episode.[7])

On bell hooks and k.d. lang and a few other such examples: These are exceptions that are made to usual styling of proper names (per MOS:CAPS), because independent reliable sources overwhelmingly go along with those stylizations. (Allegedly, anyway; I think the [l|L]ang situation actually needs revisiting, because I regularly see her name given in regular "K. D. Lang" form in source material.) An "un-exception" is E. E. Cummings, because sources do not consistently render it "e. e. cummings" (which was something that wasn't even his own preference, just an idea his publisher imposed). Another exception (to MOS:INITIALS in this case) is CCH Pounder, though of course C. C. H. Pounder is a redirect). These aren't really MOS:TM matters, strictly speaking, though it's important to realize (WP:WIKILAWYER gets into this a little) that if a general principle can be found in one policy or guideline and seems more or less applicable to a closely analogous situation, that it is likely to be applied by the community. E.g., MOS:TM is routinely applied to governmental organizations and their materials, even though in most jurisdictions trademark law per se does not apply. The guideline is meant to encompass trademarks and anything that, from a concise style-guide perspective, is essentially indistinguishable from a trademark. So, in debates on actor/musician/writer names, sometimes MOS:TM will be cited, and people generally understand and accept the argument being made: WP does not engage in weird stylization except when virtually all the source material also does so for that particular case. (That said, we generally don't know whether an individual has established a trademark or not; various people, especially when they have product/service lines named after them, have actually done so, and this is legal in many if not most jurisdictions. We don't need to do a bunch of WP:OR in primary-source tradmark agency databases; we just apply the guideline in the spirit it was intended: trademarks and anything like them.) The humor essay WP:AJR is also kind of pertinent to this application-to-the-closely-analogous process; we don't need to micro-specify every imaginable application for a general principle.

Whether an individual (non-series, non-franchise) work's title may be trademarked wasn't the question (and it varies by jurisdiction). Series/franchise works can be trademarked in virtually all of them, and today with innumerable works also tying in to games and other product lines, there are many avenues even in the US system for trademarking the name of even a single work, by trademarking a broader category of related products and including the work within it. The most common method (in the US) is to file an intent-to-use application for one or more side products that ties into the work (e.g. a toy) before release of said side-product or the work itself. This is routine in movie, TV, comics, and other production. And of course consistently use a particular logo for the work and related products, which can be independently trademarked as a logo. Harry Potter and the Sorceror's Stone actually is a trademark [8], by this sort of mechanism. I don't really mean this in a tit-for-tat, I-gotcha way; as a stand-alone point, it's trivial. But it's important to your idea of trying to draw a bright line between "names" and "trademarks". It's yet another thing that would involve a bunch of name-by-name OR with primary-source government TM records, and our guidelines were clearly never written with any intent for editors to "go there". They cannot reasonably be interpreted as if they are drawing any such sort of distinction.

I'm not surprised that Wordmark is weak; a lot of our legal articles need overhauling. Glad you'll continue to be around, and I'm not bothered by an "agree to disagree" situation, since we all have to do that all the time here, or progress would just stop. But some of us are strongly resistant to changes to MoS (even more so than other WP:P&G pages), for reasons that are largely covered at WP:MOSBLOAT and WP:MOSFAQ2, and some additional ones at WP:SSF, WP:CSF, and WP:REVELATION. To compress all of that into a one liner: After 20+ years, MoS already says what it needs to say and we've been over it all before, while virtually all proposals for substantive change to it are motivated by fallacious reasoning about how to write for a general audience; these fallacies arise from being mired in a particular "specialty" (occupation, fandom, etc.), being familiar only with (or otherwise over-favoring) a particular narrow genre of non-encyclopedic writing (e.g. entertainment journalism), or simply being insistent on some individual personal preference. With all of MoS, the idea is to just accept and follow it while writing here (much of style is arbitrary but we have to have some general rules to stop "style fights" and have a consistent presentation for the reader), and diverge from it only when nearly all of the source material is engaging in the same divergence for that particluar unsual case. MoS in particular is subject to constant attempts to make "drive-by" changes to it. This is because everyone was raised with a particular set of style "rules", and often picked up another one professionally, and all native speakers and even advanced learners have a sense of personal mastery of the language, a feel that they know what is "right". But MoS is not about imposing what is "right" against what is "wrong", it is only about providing a rather minimal set of sometimes arbitrary rules to impose consistency and stop style-warring disruption. PS: Sorry if any of this comes off as repetitive. I'm just trying to be as clear as I reasonably can, and sometimes putting the same core point in a different wording helps.
— SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 13:57, 26 October 2023 (UTC)

Having been harassed, but not stalked, I am aware of some of the issues. I'll admit I haven't seen (until now) the WP:OUTING policy, but, even not having seen it, I was careful not to put anything in what I wrote that wasn't on your own user page. I did not think saying we shared contacts crossed the line, since no names were listed (and, FYI, I actually didn't look past that on LinkedIn). I actually started out editing Wikipedia (in 2001/2002) with an anonymous/pseduonymous account and changed (in 2009) to use my real name in response to how badly people acted here. I still believe anonymity enables jerks.

The problem I have with "preponderance of sources" is twofold: 1) it's in the eye of particular beholders, meaning that not only is it extremely subjective, but the interpretation varies widely; 2) it's often ignored in favor of "but this version is already on Wikipedia," an argument I find worthless (I wish there was a guideline on that!). [Side note: this argument is frequently accompanied by the statement that a source is needed to remove unsourced information that's already in an article, which just isn't true.]

On the i/o talk page, the argument is made that any references to uppercase I/O mean that lowercase i/o can't be used. There, almost all sources use lowercase i/o. There, I proposed that a decision be deferred until the album itself is finally released in early December. Hopefully, increased publicity at that point will make it clear enough, but it's also not my life's work.

I haven't actually researched k.d. lang; I know bell hooks better. If k.d. lang is K.D. Lang everywhere except album covers (or even most places), I would say that is her name and lowercase is a stylization. I don't know. WRT trademarks vs. names, I'd rather MOS:TM was named Manual of Style/Names, but I know that won't happen. Here's a thought:

Add a short section "Names" after the intro which takes the third sentence of the first paragraph, making it more prominent and clearer.
Add the text ", whether or not they are trademarked." to the end of that sentence (this is already implied, but not explicitly stated).
Add WP:NAMES as a redirect to the section.

There is a slight bit of AJ-defense here, but I think it brings clarity. Any discussion about k.d. lang or i/o could/would/should cite WP:NAMES, not WP:TM. What do you think?

Interesting on Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone! (note that it's for the movie, not the book).

I'll work on Wordmark (which, in the US, should be Word mark). I feel a little bit guilty adding text without citations, but I'm adding places where citations are needed, and there weren't any citations before. I'm also unsure what to do with stuff that I think is just made up. I don't want to waste time looking for sources that don't exist.

RoyLeban (talk) 02:52, 31 October 2023 (UTC)

@RoyLeban: People will always make bad arguments. "This version is already on Wikipedia" is one (it's the WP:CONTENTAGE fallacy commingled with the WP:OTHERCONTENT one). So is "a source is needed to remove unsourced information that's already in an article" (directly contrary to WP:V policy). So is "I can find one or two occurrences of I/O in sources, so i/o can't be used." If about 95% of the sources are using i/o, then Wikipedia should also (but that doesn't mean just "sources we've bothered to cite already", it means RS in the aggregate, and ones independent of the subject, not the subject's own primary-source material). If only maybe 80% of sources are using i/o, then Wikipedia should default to its own style guidelines and use I/O, since sources are broadly inconsistent. If it's in a discretionary range of about 85-90% (and these numbers are easy to fudge by how the searches are done), then people are going to argue about it no matter what, and there's nothing we can really do about that. It's always going to come down to whether a sufficient number of editors are convinced by the sourcing they do and that other editors present, that some exception should be made. There is some collective subjectivity involved, but that's the case with most things on WP.

"WP:NAMES" wouldn't work, because WP:NAMES is already a shortcut for something else, and MoS is moving to "MOS:FOO" shortcuts to stop using up all available mnemonic terms in "WP:" shortcuts. MOS:NAMES is also already a shortcut for something else (the MOS:BIO section about human names), and "names" of various sorts are part of various other MoS pages. It's a very generic word. The text you suggest adding, "whether or not they are trademarked", isn't necessary. The current material reads: "Trademarks include [blah blah blah ....] The advice in this page also applies to names and phrases used to [yak yak yak] ...." So it is already clear, with "also applies to" that the things following that phrase are not literally the legal trademarks covered by the earlier sentence. This footnote addition (and emphasis of also) may help resolve any further supposed inclarity, but of course someone could revert me (probably on the basis that it wasn't needed in the first place).

On cleanup of Wordmark: If something seems probably true but unsourced, I would flag it with {{citation needed}}, but if it sounds bullshitty, use {{dubious}} and then say on the talk page why I think it's dubious, and announce an intention to remove it within the week if it's not sourced. Just gotta remember to follow up on it; a list of editing-stuff-to-do in a sandbox or on your user page can help. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 07:55, 31 October 2023 (UTC)

Just catching up... WRT the ContentAge fallacy, I wish you'd weigh in on the Hunter Biden laptop controversy page. It's been four years, since the laptop was supposedly found and there has never been a single RS that definitively says there was an actual laptop and the data came from it. Yeah, there are tons of "echo chamber" mentions, but no actual evidence shown or referred to. There are a couple of extremely stubborn editors who have blocked all attempts to clarify that it is "alleged", using the argument that a citation is needed to remove an unsourced statement (and there's no WP policy that says that). Various editors keep noticing the problem and getting driven away.

On i/o, it is impossible to search for i/o vs I/O but it does seem to be meeting the 95% threshold you suggest. In my opinion, even at 80%, the extreme consistency of the creator (as compared with k.d. lang, as you mentioned) pushes me toward using the lowercase.

WRT Wordmark, thanks for the suggestion of dubious. I don't see it often, so it didn't even occur to me. It's going to take some time to find good non-primary source references for this page, there is so much junk out there and I don't have good books in my own library.

I had meant MOS:NAMES, not WP:NAMES, a bad typo, and I thought I had checked it but I must have goofed. What do you think of this:

Add a short section "Names" after the intro which takes the third sentence of the first paragraph, making it more prominent and clearer.
Add the text ", whether or not they are trademarked." to the end of that sentence (this is already implied, but not explicitly stated).The
This new section references MOS:NAMES and MOS:NAMES references this section. Not having the latter reference is a serious omission, and a link to this new section would be better than a link to MOS:TM.

Thoughts? RoyLeban (talk) 06:50, 8 November 2023 (UTC)

I generally don't get involved in current US politics dispute, because it is a minefield. If you think there's a WP:TAGTEAM of a few editors engaging in WP:OWN behavior there and falsely demanding reliable sources to remove/change an unsourced assertion, then this is a noticeboard matter; anything from the WP:ANI shitshow to even WP:BLPN would work (since it's about allegations relating to Hunter Biden who is a living person). If your enumerated points are about MOS:TM (they don't seem applicable to MOS:NAMES), then 1) the entire page is already about names. 2) The emphasized "also" already serves this purpose more concisely. And "all other names of businesses and similar entities, and products and services thereof" in the sentence after that also make the same point. There is no lack of clarity. 3) There is no need for such a section, so no need for cross-references back and forth from such a section to another guideline. But since cases like "k.d. lang" and "CCH Pounder" are covered at MOS:NAMES, I added a cross-reference to it in MOS:TM. However, it may in the long run make more sense to merge that material into MOS:TM and replace it at MOS:NAMES with a MOS:TM cross-reference. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 13:59, 8 November 2023 (UTC)

Thanks for your thoughts. WP:OWN is definitely happening there but hard to prove; not as sure about WP:TAGTEAM, though it's not something I had thought about. Even attempts to add citation needed have been rebuffed by disingenuous arguments that sources say what they clearly don't.

On TM & NAMES, I think a separate section (point 1) would be clearer, but that is my least important point. On point 2, I think the last sentence of the first paragraph of MOS:TM is easy to misread; adding ", whether or not they are trademarked" would make it clearer. On point 3, I think having MOS:TM and MOS:NAMES cross-reference each other would also bring more clarity. A complete merge, as you've suggested might not be a bad idea, though that might cause more confusion. As I've said all along, it was not my intent with these edits to change any guidelines or policy, just to make them clearer and reflect better what the guidelines really are. RoyLeban (talk) 12:01, 10 November 2023 (UTC)

Feedback request: Language and linguistics request for comment

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FYI, you pasted the wrong link in the Iterresise ANI

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Being 99.999% sure of which one you meant, I tried to fix it for you, but I was reverted. —swpb^{T • beyond • mutual} 14:42, 24 October 2023 (UTC)

Thanks; fixed. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 15:10, 24 October 2023 (UTC)

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November Articles for creation backlog drive

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