MEpedia talk:Manual of style

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Citations Guideline?

I notice that under "Learn more" there is "Citations Guideline to come".
Is someone still planning on writing a Citations Guideline or is this something that can be removed?
Thanks.
Pyrrhus (talk) 21:21, 14 March 2019 (EDT)

I have removed that line. If anyone writes a “Citations guideline”, please put it back. Thanks.

Pyrrhus (talk) 18:03, 15 April 2019 (EDT)

Dates

I am a bit confused about the “Dates” section. Are we supposed to use the three-letter abbreviation for months, or can we spell out the full month?
Pyrrhus (talk) 18:03, 15 April 2019 (EDT)

One consideration is refs: I think some templates will spit out an error message if you only use the first three leters? So that might be a reason to go with the full name, if we'd like to standardize this. Canele (talk) 18:13, 15 April 2019 (EDT)

Three letter months eg Jun is what I've been doing, I think that may already be the standard. Templates give errors for DD MMM YYY and YYYY-MM but not MMM DD, YYYY - or MMM YYYY - which is our standard. I tried to improve the help information that comes up with date errors a while ago. I don't know why but the citation generator comes up with the wrong date styles. notjusttired (talk) 19:34, 15 April 2019 (EDT)

This is all new to me. I’ve seen User:Kmdenmark fixing “CS1” errors but I don’t know exactly what these errors are. Do we know which templates tend to spit out errors? Thanks.

Pyrrhus (talk) 20:16, 15 April 2019 (EDT)

Here is a helpful Wikipedia link to CS1 errors for dates: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:CS1_errors#ExamplesOfUnacceptableDates

The most frequent error that our citation generator makes is "Ambiguous date range or year and month." E.g., it will generate a date as such: |date=2002-03. The computer doesn't know if you mean Mar 2002 or the years 2002-2003. The easiest correction is to change it to Mar 2002 or March 2002. You don't need to abbreviate the month, but if you do, the program wants a 3-letter abbreviation.

The second most common date error is when the contributor uses the wrong punctuation. E.g., February 28 1900 will read as an error bec it has no comma; it must be changed to February 28, 1900 or 28 February 1900 or Feb 28, 1900 or 1900-02-28. Use of slashes also elicits an error message. E.g., 12/6/87 must be changed to December 6, 1987 or Dec 6, 1987 or 1987-12-06.

I hope that helps. Kmdenmark (talk) 12:03, 16 April 2019 (EDT)

That’s very helpful, Karen! Thanks! Now we need to incorporate this into the documentation somewhere. (And clarify how dates are to be formatted in the body of the text, too.)

Pyrrhus (talk) 12:58, 16 April 2019 (EDT)

Existing help info on dates when you click the ? icon brings up Help:CS1_errors, see Help:CS1_errors#Check_date_values_in:_.7C.3Cparam1.3E.3D.2C_.7C.3Cparam2.3E.3D.2C_... here and MEpedia:Manual_of_style#Dates for some documentation. I've requested that developers look into if the American date setting is on, I am not sure but it's possible that this might fix the date generation formatting issues. notjusttired (talk) 13:26, 16 April 2019 (EDT)

That’s very helpful too, Njt! Thanks! It would certainly be nice if we could solve some of the problems just by fixing a date setting!

Pyrrhus (talk) 13:49, 16 April 2019 (EDT)