[WikiEN-l] Rewriting the MOS in English

[Oskar Sigvardsson]

On 5/21/07, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> Our Manual of Style is lengthy, comprehensive and really sucks to
> read. Compare to something really readable, like Fowler's or Strunk &
> White. Or even Chicago. Have you ever picked up these books and
> thought "this is really good, I can use this stuff"? I'd hope you had.
>
> But, rather than being a guideline for thoughtful application by
> editors seeking guidance in writing effective encyclopedia entries,
> it's become a sequence of programming instructions for bots.
>
> So here's an attempt to make the intro readable:
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style&diff=132452254&oldid=132369265
>
> Our MOS should be something that editors should *want* to read.
>
> Anyone want to help recast the rest of the megabytes of MOS as
> thoughtful guidance in English, rather than programming instructions
> for bots?

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