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Welcome, Codename Lisa!

Hello, Codename Lisa, and welcome to Misplaced Pages! I'm Mr. Stradivarius, one of the thousands of editors here at Misplaced Pages. Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are a few good links for newcomers:

  The five pillars of Misplaced Pages

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— Mr. Stradivarius 18:59, 19 May 2012 (UTC)

Editing News #1—2018

Read this in another language • Subscription list for the English Misplaced Pages • Subscription list for the multilingual edition

Did you know that you can now use the visual diff tool on any page?

Sometimes, it is hard to see important changes in a wikitext diff. This screenshot of a wikitext diff (click to enlarge) shows that the paragraphs have been rearranged, but it does not highlight the removal of a word or the addition of a new sentence.

If you enable the Beta Feature for "⧼visualeditor-preference-visualdiffpage-label⧽", you will have a new option. It will give you a new box at the top of every diff page. This box will let you choose either diff system on any edit.

Click the toggle button to switch between visual and wikitext diffs.

In the visual diff, additions, removals, new links, and formatting changes will be highlighted. Other changes, such as changing the size of an image, are described in notes on the side.

This screenshot shows the same edit as the wikitext diff. The visual diff highlights the removal of one word and the addition of a new sentence. An arrow indicates that the paragraph changed location.

You can read and help translate the user guide, which has more information about how to use the visual editor.

Since the last newsletter, the Editing Team has spent most of their time supporting the 2017 wikitext editor mode, which is available inside the visual editor as a Beta Feature, and improving the visual diff tool. Their work board is available in Phabricator. You can find links to the work finished each week at mw:VisualEditor/Weekly triage meetings. Their current priorities are fixing bugs, supporting the 2017 wikitext editor, and improving the visual diff tool.

Recent changes

• The 2017 wikitext editor is available as a Beta Feature on desktop devices. It has the same toolbar as the visual editor and can use the citoid service and other modern tools. The team have been comparing the performance of different editing environments. They have studied how long it takes to open the page and start typing. The study uses data for more than one million edits during December and January. Some changes have been made to improve the speed of the 2017 wikitext editor and the visual editor. Recently, the 2017 wikitext editor opened fastest for most edits, and the 2010 WikiEditor was fastest for some edits. More information will be posted at mw:Contributors/Projects/Editing performance.
• The visual diff tool was developed for the visual editor. It is now available to all users of the visual editor and the 2017 wikitext editor. When you review your changes, you can toggle between wikitext and visual diffs. You can also enable the new Beta Feature for "Visual diffs". The Beta Feature lets you use the visual diff tool to view other people's edits on page histories and Special:RecentChanges.
• Wikitext syntax highlighting is available as a Beta Feature for both the 2017 wikitext editor and the 2010 wikitext editor.
• The citoid service automatically translates URLs, DOIs, ISBNs, and PubMed id numbers into wikitext citation templates. This tool has been used at the English Misplaced Pages for a long time. It is very popular and useful to editors, although it can be tricky for admins to set up. Other wikis can have this service, too. Please read the instructions. You can ask the team to help you enable citoid at your wiki.

Let's work together

• The team is planning a presentation about editing tools for an upcoming Wikimedia Foundation metrics and activities meeting.
• Wikibooks, Wikiversity, and other communities may have the visual editor made available by default to contributors. If your community wants this, then please contact Dan Garry.
• The <references /> block can automatically display long lists of references in columns on wide screens. This makes footnotes easier to read. This has already been enabled at the English Misplaced Pages. If you want columns for a long list of footnotes on this wiki, you can use either <references /> or the plain (no parameters) {{reflist}} template. If you edit a different wiki, you can request multi-column support for your wiki.
• If you aren't reading this in your preferred language, then please help us with translations! Subscribe to the Translators mailing list or contact us directly. We will notify you when the next issue is ready for translation. Thank you!

—User:Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 23:14, 28 February 2018 (UTC)

Capitalisation when referring to articles per se (e.g. in hatnotes)

Regarding your last edit at Library (computing), whilst this is rather trivial, as well as it being standard English usage, the following guidelines/policies (i.e.: all pertaining to capitalisation or hatnotes) prescribe the use of sentence case (rather than lower case) for the name of an article when it is being referred to as such (as is always the case in hatnotes):

MOS:CAPS § Titles of works (cited in your edit summary removing sentence case)

The 2nd paragraph (in full) follows:

Misplaced Pages normally follows these conventions when referring to such works, whether in the name of an article or within the text. For other article titles, Misplaced Pages uses sentence case. In sentence case, generally only the first word and all proper names are capitalized (this is also true of section headings, captions, etc.). Examples: List of selection theorems, Women's rights in Haiti.

MOS:TITLECAPS

The 2nd para (in full) is the 2nd para above verbatim.

WP:HN#Format

The 2nd para (in full) follows:

Current style on the English Misplaced Pages is to italicize and to indent each note, without a bullet before the item. A horizontal dividing line should not be placed either under a note or after the final item in a list. Links to articles should follow the naming conventions for capitalization – typically sentence case, not all lower case.

WP:NCCAPS

In its entirety:

In general, each word in English titles of books, films, and other works takes an initial capital, except for articles ("a", "an", "the"), the word "to" as part of an infinitive, and prepositions and coordinating conjunctions shorter than five letters (e.g., "on", "from", "and", "with"), unless they begin or end a title or subtitle. Examples: A New Kind of Science, Ghost in the Shell, To Be or Not to Be, The World We Live In. (For details, see the main guideline on title capitalization. For non-English titles, see below.)

It is also notable that all of the above always follow sentence case in their own usage when referring to articles as do nearly all other hatnotes on Misplaced Pages.

This convention is also implied by all the examples at WP:Hatnote (e.g.: Turkey (bird) at WP:1HAT) and the documentation of the template in use at Template:About, copied below:

{{About|Use1||Article2|section=yes}} →

This section is about Use1. For other uses, see Article2.

P.S. FWIW, in hindsight, consdering meaning, I think having two hatnotes at Library (computing) is preferable&emdash;since, as you said, despite the old hatnote wording, there are two different semantic errors involved (despite the guideline at WP:1HAT). So, thanks for that. (I chose to initially only alter the existing wording to correct grammar to respect editors on the article who knew more about the subject.)

Llew Mawr (talk) 13:25, 2 March 2018 (UTC)

Hello, Llew Mawr

How do you do? I'm glad you dropped by.

After reading your message in whole it appears that you are here to tell me that when I write hatnotes, I must use sentence case. So far, so good, but the problem I see is in this line: "cited in your edit summary removing sentence case". Actually, I did the opposite; in other words, I didn't remove the sentence case; I enforced sentence case by toggling the case of a random upper case letter that was disrupting sentence case. The result is this:

It is not to be confused with library software.

The whole text is in sentence case.

I have a feeling I am missing something here though. You seem to have spent a lot of time and energy writing a message that talks about title of works, but neither "It is not to be confused with library software" nor "library software" are titles of a work. (I can't remember a precedent either. "Microsoft store" vs. "Microsoft Store" rings a bell though.) So, what am I missing?

Best regards,
Codename Lisa (talk) 17:15, 2 March 2018 (UTC)

Thanks for such a prompt response and for encouraging me to think about this issue (having previously followed the convention of capitalisation in hatnotes without reference to policy).

neither "It is not to be confused with library software" nor "library software" are titles of a work

To be clear, I think "library software" refers to the article itself (not the phrase nor the topic) making it the title of a work, specifically an article title.

Although, I admit, that is more obviously the case with Template:About than Template:Distinguish.

If "library software" were the title of an external work, MOS:TITLECAPS dictates the use of title case ("Library Software"). Sentence case ("Library software") is only used in article titles and when referring to articles as articles.

FWIW, I think it is a failure in WP:Hatnote that it doesn't make this more explicit. Although I think the usual convention is supported by the definiton of sentence case. BTW, I obviously don't care about the caps on one article, but my interest is to get some kind of consensus between us, and more widely. We both seem to be editors who use disambiguating hatnotes a lot, and this is an area where an inconsistent style could cause WP:surpise (as it did to me when I read the article).

Llew Mawr (talk) 23:45, 3 March 2018 (UTC)

You also asked for clarification on what I mean by "use sentence case".

I'm actually not sure we should be using the term, "sentence case" (e.g.: at WP:TITLEFORMAT) to explain this to editors. It isn't a common expression outside of linguistics academia since it is solely an orthographic concept (which depends on meaning) lacking in practical application within typography, word processing or coding (except in very high level natural language processing).

This is becase, unlike other capitalisation cases, it isn't binary (i.e.: either in use or not on a given fragment/excerpt). Since your edit, the sentence is now indeed, as you say, in sentence case. However, the title of the article isn't.

Sentence case means the phrase in question starts with a capital letter as if it is a sentence (even if it isn't). For instance, bullet-point items should (per WP:BULLET in WP:MOS) always be in sentence case (start with a capiyal letter) even though thet are sentence frsgments and even if they actually are within a larger sentence.

Llew Mawr (talk) 00:02, 4 March 2018 (UTC)

Regarding Cite web template

In this revision to the citation style template, you mentioned that "Sometimes a {{Cite web}} must be used while others can be to meet the consistency requirements of WP:FA." I'm unfamiliar with this use case, and was wondering if you could provide an example of a FA where this was necessary or further explanation of why Cite web might be used instead of other more specific templates. --E to the Pi times i (talk) 14:50, 2 March 2018 (UTC)

Hello, E to the Pi times i

The problem is devilishly simple: Featured articles are considered to be some of the best articles Misplaced Pages has to offer. Misplaced Pages:Featured article criteria requires:

2. c. consistent citations: where required by criterion 1c, consistently formatted inline citations using either footnotes (<ref>Smith 2007, p. 1.</ref>) or Harvard referencing (Smith 2007, p. 1)—see citing sources for suggestions on formatting references. Citation templates are not required.

Twice before, I nominated Microsoft Security Essentials for FA. The first time, I failed. The second time, it was promoted. I learned the hard way the FA process looks down upon any reason, pretext or even policy causes the citation style to be inconsistent as shenanigans. You can't go there and say "but the /doc page on such and such page says 'use {{cite news}} for this and use {{cite web}} for that.'" They pitty the fool who takes that advice. For example, using {{Cite press release}} in an FA article is grounds for failure because this is just a bad template that does nothing but causing a slight inconsistency.

Normally, I'd dig the review link for you, but I am afraid I am being called. Please feel to look for it in Talk:Microsoft Security Essentials.

Best regards,
Codename Lisa (talk) 16:46, 2 March 2018 (UTC)

I do not see where it was said that use of the {{Cite press release}} restricted MSE's promotion to FA, after looking through the 2 FA candidate evaluations and the review. Even searching through the edit summaries of the MSE article yielded no results. Could you please clarify where it was said that {{Cite press release}} was inconsistent for the standards of an FA?

Even if {{Cite press release}} is inconsistent, that seems to be a possibility for future improvement to the template, not a reason to expand the scope of {{Cite web}}. {{Cite web}} seems like it should ideally only be used for websites when nothing else is possible. --E to the Pi times i (talk) 22:29, 3 March 2018 (UTC)

Hello again, E to the Pi times i

You say you don't see my {{Cite press release}} example in there. Well, that's because it was just an example for the modern times, not an example for that time. During that FA, it was the slight difference between {{Cite news}} and {{Cite web}} that made trouble. You can imagine when that certain slight different made so much trouble, just how the bigger difference in my example makes trouble. Of course, later on, it was through my nomination that {{Cite news}} and {{Cite web}} lost their difference. In their documentation page, I have written a small part on this.

Look, before trying to revolutionize what I do, you must understand what I do. You have never done a FA before. But I have. I speak from experience.

Let's discuss from another angle:

You know that what contributors actually do, unless contested, is taken to have consensus. Well, here is what contributors actually use:

You see? Our contributors are using {{Cite web}} vastly greater than any other template. Clearly, this is not their last resort; it is used 2.9× that of the second most popular entry, {{Cite book}}.

Also, ask yourself: Can you honestly believe that they are NOT using {{Cite web}} for things that are neither news, books, journals, magazines, encyclopedias, press releases, videos, report, conferences, theses, podcasts, mailing lists, newsgroups and interviews? (What are they using it for, then? Facebook profiles? 2.7 million of them?) Or are they actually using {{Cite web}} for all those things, without regards to its name, because it is somehow functionally more superior or better promoted?( Again, from experience, I know that the latter is true.)

Nevertheless, one thing is clear: The consensus is not on using {{Cite web}} as the last resort.

I suspect people are using {{Cite web}} in cases where there are more appropriate templates because they are not aware of the other templates, not because they think it's a superior or more appropriate template. In my opinion, we have to discuss what {{Cite web}} should be used for, not necessarily what it is, because inconsistencies can still accumulate on a mass scale without them being correct. Therefore, I have posted a section on Citation Style 1's talk. We can continue the discussion there. --E to the Pi times i (talk) 15:05, 4 March 2018 (UTC)

Image on the Commons

I have uploaded your image on the Commons: File:CDBurnerXP logo.png. I think, the image on this Misplaced Pages ought to removed. Dimon4ezzz (talk) 14:30, 3 March 2018 (UTC)