Wikipedia talk:Writing better articles

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*Avoid making your articles orphans Avoiding common mistakes Balance parts of a page Check your fiction Define and describe Describe external links Establish context Integrate changes Lead section News style Pay attention to spelling Principle of least astonishment Use colour sparingly Use of 'refers to' Use other languages sparingly --- Proper archive 2004-2007

[edit] Tense of inanimate objects

I started thinking about this after I changed the introductory tense of parallel motion from "the parallel motion was" to the "the parallel motion is" on the grounds that an invention or mechanism doesn't cease to exist just because it's old. I'm now wondering about other articles and I'm seeing a marked lack of consistency here. I looked at various articles about discontinued cars: "The DeLorean DMC-12 is a sports car" while "The Ford Probe was a coupe." Is there a consensus about this? Are there guidelines about this issue anywhere on Wikipedia? Thanks, Ce1984 (talk) 00:36, 26 August 2008 (UTC)

[edit] tense of speech

Should we refer to speeches in the present tense, or the past tense? The section on WP:TENSE currently refers only to fiction, and at least some speeches are not fictional :-).

I feel that non-fictional speeches and books also "exist in a kind of perpetual present tense".

This was drawn to my attention when I saw the 2008 State of the Union Address edited to convert it from the future tense to the past tense. Currently it claims

The 2008 State of the Union Address was a speech given by...

which rubs me the wrong way.

It was a speech? Pray tell, what is it now?

I would prefer

The 2008 State of the Union Address is a speech that was given by... (the speech itself is in the perpetual present tense)

but I would also be satisfied with

The 2008 State of the Union Address was given by... (a particular delivery of the speech, in the past, in the past tense)

The first sentence in the Wikipedia articles of a few arbitrarily chosen examples from the List of speeches:

• The Beatitudes is the beginning portion of ..
• "Give me Liberty, or give me Death!" is a famous quotation attributed to Patrick Henry ...
• 1797 State of the Union Address: John Adams' First State of the Union Address was delivered ...
• The House Divided Speech was an address given by Abraham Lincoln ...
• The Gettysburg Address is the most famous speech of U.S. President Abraham Lincoln ...
• The 'Fourteen Points' were listed in a speech delivered by President Woodrow Wilson ...
• We shall fight on the beaches is a common title given to a speech delivered by Sir Winston Churchill ...
• The Quit India speech is a speech made by Mahatma Gandhi ...
• There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom is the title of a famous lecture given by physicist Richard Feynman ...
• "I Have a Dream" is the popular name given to the historic public speech by Martin Luther King, Jr., ...
• "Ich bin ein Berliner" ("I am a Berliner") is a quotation from a June 26, 1963 speech by U.S. President John F. Kennedy ...

Most of these seem to support the idea that even non-fictional speeches "exist in a kind of perpetual present tense". Should the remaining ones in the past-tense be "corrected" to the present tense? Or is there some reason Wikipedia should use the past tense to refer to some (or all) speeches? How should we update WP:TENSE to also include speeches?

--68.0.124.33 (talk) 01:05, 30 January 2008 (UTC)

Is this "perpetual present tense" the same as the historical present? --68.0.124.33 (talk) 13:43, 15 July 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Debate over tone

There is debate here Talk:Film_noir#Tone_issues over tone in an article. Perhaps those interested in such a topic can give their input.--Crossmr (talk) 15:11, 21 February 2008 (UTC)

[edit] TRADUCCIÓN DEL ARTÍCULO

Hola, podrian traducir este artículo al idioma español?, me sería muy útil su ayuda.

Gracias —Preceding unsigned comment added by 132.248.251.79 (talk) 18:51, 7 April 2008 (UTC)

Véase es.wikipedia.org por favor. - Dan (talk) 19:12, 16 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] "Be concise" (etc)

Unusually for a quotation from Strunk, the one in the article ("Vigorous writing is concise....") isn't fatuous. I even agree with it. But then:

The ideal method of specifying on-going events is "as of 2008". Wikipedia "grammar bots" will replace these types of expressions with correct wording.

Ugh.

For a start, how about The best way to report the current state is "as of 2008"?

Presumably "these types of expressions" -- Does this perhaps mean "this type of expression" or "these expressions"? -- are "'at the present time' or 'currently'", rather than "as of 2008". If so, then there's nothing unconcise about "currently", so I don't know why it's mentioned in this section; but that little point aside, if some grammar bottie is anyway going to convert such expressions into "as of 2008", then why is the reader being told to write "as of 2008"? -- Hoary (talk) 13:08, 25 May 2008 (UTC)

Part of the puzzle is here: Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Wikipedia:As of. Result was "no consensus"; I wasn't successful in getting people to take a stand one way or the other. - Dan Dank55 (talk)(mistakes) 14:05, 25 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Huh?

"Punctuation marks that appear in the article should only be used per generally accepted practice."

Was this one of the winning entries at the Annual Circular Logic Contest? I'm sure someone will come along and explain what it means, but as it's written in the article, it's entirely baffling. --Cryptic C62 · Talk 15:17, 15 June 2008 (UTC)

[edit] FOG Index

I also posted this on the science portal discussion page, so I appollogize for the spam.

I had an idea but I don't know how to implement it. I've noticed that a great deal of the articles have very high FOG Index, for example the LTP article has a FOG index of 21, while normal people with no understanding of the material generally best understand the scientific article when it has a FOG index of 12. Is there anyway to encourage the writers to use smaller sentences with exactly one idea (not two or three). You can try out the FOG index calculator if you like [1], but here are some results I found for these articles (I just looked at their intro paragraphs)

• Electricity FOG index=21
• Cancer FOG index=19
• Physics FOG index=18
• Action Potential FOG index=17
• Synapse FOG index=16

I think it will greatly simplify articles if we limit our sentences to one idea only, and thereby, reduce our FOG index. Paskari (talk) 17:50, 2 August 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Use of "recent" and "to date" in articles

I have come across a few articles that use the term "recent" to refer to the placement of an event in time. I have been unable to find a recommendation about this in any FAQ about article writing. When an article states something like, "New standards have recently been put in to effect, requiring..." or "Recent discoveries have revealed that..." the reader is left with a vague idea of when something happened and cannot compare the stated fact with other events in a timeline. Shouldn't the use of "recent" be discouraged? I'll also question the use of "to date" as found in this article: "Out of the 1,400 plus films mixed in SDDS, only 97 of them to date have been mixed to support the full 8 channels"MRJayMach (talk) 13:30, 31 August 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Interview style

I've come across articles written in a non-encyclopedic style separate from the already-covered essay, promotional, resume, and autobiographical forms. This if the interview form. See the current version of Zebra & Giraffe for an example. I think it would be useful to have a cleanup template for articles of this nature, to guide the author, and to address it explicitly in the guidelines.

As the Zebra & Giraffe article (acknowledged from the outset to be an interview, originally with the author's byline), an interview form is the second-hand equivalent of the essay or personal reflection. The article purports to be about the band but, being an interview with the band's founder, it has four significant faults:

• It's really mostly about the founder, with a great deal of detail about his background.

• It's filled with quotations from the founder, making the article essentially his personal reflection.

• None of the quotations are referenceable; the article itself is the primary source for these quotations.

• Much of the information presented directly rather than as quoted is still likely drawn from the interview and is therefore unreferenceable, and it may even incorporate substantial synthesis on the part of the writer.

Thus, the interview format, like the autobiography or the essay, presents a distinct composition of issues relating to style, tone, objectivity, original research, referenceability, and so on, and I think it would be useful to address it explicitly in the guidelines and create an appropriate template to guide users.

Thoughts? —Largo Plazo (talk) 22:34, 16 September 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Is this a tone issue or something else?

See Revolutionary etude. Yes, Chopin himself. I read carefully and I stumbled on much feared but essential. Ehm...does THIS belong into a WP article? Or should it, at all? -andy 85.176.226.145 (talk) 07:30, 17 September 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Move discussion regarding bold in opening sentence to wp:Lead section?

Please see the discussion at Wikipedia talk:Lead section#Who's on first?. Butwhatdoiknow (talk) 16:13, 17 September 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Bluelinking in headings

Can somebody clarify what bluelinking is in the "Headings" subsection? It seems like wikipedia jargon. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 72.140.22.44 (talk) 21:27, 29 September 2008 (UTC)

Bluelinking is what I just did to the heading of this section. It's a link to a real page, in contrast to a redlink like this one to New Article, a nonexistent page. —Largo Plazo (talk) 21:39, 29 September 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for clarifying, and to User:Butwhatdoiknow for editing the article to make it clear -- 72.140.22.44 (talk) 00:15, 30 September 2008 (UTC)

This is a bluelink: Wikipedia:Help, as is the word "headings" in tthe header of this section. This is a redlink: non-existant-article. -- Boracay Bill (talk) 02:03, 30 September 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Expand WP:TOPIC ?

Over at WT:NOR, there's been a long debate over whether to change the requirement that sources must be directly related to the article topic, directly refer to the article topic. Those who are pushing for the change argue that the current wording allows off-topic sources, and hence off-topic statements and WP:SYN. I and some others have argued that the problem is not with the sources, but rather with the off-topic statements themselves. I'm wondering if it would be appropriate to expand on WP:TOPIC so that the requirement to stay on topic becomes more robust. lk (talk) 17:55, 4 October 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Weird sentence

This sentence is bizarre, and I'm removing it because I've never heard of it and it's almost impossible to follow: "Try to bridge each sentence with the sentence before it by using an idea or word that appears in both sentences." —Werson (talk) 18:10, 5 October 2008 (UTC)

Hmm that makes sense to me. It's talking about transitions between sentences (and, in turn, paragraphs), to ensure prose flows well. I see why you felt it was unclear though. Changing it to "... that appeared in the preceding sentence." improves it slightly. Whitehorse1 18:06, 21 November 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Reference library category

In order to help facilitate easier location of potential sources of offline information to help verify the notability of article subjects and contents, I have created Category:WikiProject reference libraries and placed into it all of the reference library pages of which I am aware. Please add more project reference libraries to this category if you know of more. Additionally, feel free to create new reference library pages for any particular project as well. They can be very useful. ···日本穣^{? · Talk to Nihonjoe} 20:08, 21 November 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Order of sections?

Is there any guidance on how to decide what order sections should be in? In particular, is there any standard on where the "history" section should be? The Cricket article cited as a good example has it at the end, which I support, on the basis that that isn't the first things most readers will want to see, but other think that chronological order makes sense and the history should come first.

Thanks Ccrrccrr (talk) 22:17, 23 November 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Avoid peacock and weasel terms

This example is given at the bottom of this section:

Some critics of George W. Bush have said he has low intelligence.
Author Michael Moore in his book Stupid White Men wrote an open letter to George Bush. In it, he asked, "George, are you able to read and write on an adult level?".

Couldn't we use something with a less controversial POV?
PS. I don't know how to link to a section yet, so you'll have to be creative in going back to it, sorry. J-puppy (talk) 20:33, 28 December 2008 (UTC)