On 5/21/07, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote: I must say that I disagree slightly with your premise: the MOS is intended to be used as a reference when writing articles, so that if you are unsure about something you can easily look it up. To take a completely random example from it, about celestial bodies (this is a long quote, now): "Celestial bodies Names of other planets and stars are proper nouns and begin with a capital letter: "The planet Mars can be seen tonight in the constellation Gemini, near the star Pollux." In cases where the name has multiple words, it is treated like other proper nouns where each leading letter is capitalized: "Alpha Centauri" and not "Alpha centauri". The words sun, earth, and moon are proper nouns when the sentence uses them in an astronomical context, but not elsewhere: so "The Sun is a main sequence star, with a spectral class of G2"; but "It was a lovely day and the sun was warm". Note that these terms are proper nouns only when they refer to specific celestial bodies (our Sun, Earth and Moon): so "The Moon orbits the Earth", but "Pluto's moon Charon"." This makes for incredibly boring reading, but if you are writing an article on an astronomical topic, this is very helpful. Especially if you are, like me, not a native English speaker, and are sometimes unsure about the language. This was just a random example by the way, there are plenty of other sections with similarly helpful little hints. I don't want to the MOS to be readable, I want it to be useful. --Oskar

Hell, I've never even read the MoS. Has anyone? You either write well and reference your stuff, or you don't. It's not that hard. Oh, if someone points out that I'm doing something "wrong", I'll fix it, but if I actually bothered to read the MoS I'd never write anything or get anything done. The urge to conformity is all very nice, but sometime you just have to do your own damn thing. IAR etc. Moreschi _________________________________________________________________ Play your part in making history - Email Britain! http://www.emailbritain.co.uk/

On 5/22/07, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote: The bigger problem is the MoS's uncertainty over its own authority. IMHO, it's a rulebook. To others it's a guide, to be ignored...whenever. I feel that the encyclopaedia benefits when we have cast-iron layout rules that every article must follow, with rare and notable exceptions. To others, the MoS is a restriction on freedom of expression, to be watered down so that even vastly different approaches to layout are apparently all supported. Steve