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A fact from Breaking Barriers 50km appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know column on 25 May 2023 (check views). The text of the entry was as follows:
Latest comment: 1 year ago3 comments3 people in discussion
The following is an archived discussion of the DYK nomination of the article below. Please do not modify this page. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as this nomination's talk page, the article's talk page or Wikipedia talk:Did you know), unless there is consensus to re-open the discussion at this page. No further edits should be made to this page.
Comment: i recognize that the hook is rather trivially true if i do not state that the world record set is a 50k world record, and that the record is set during the event, but i figured that this is suggested by the context, and that a shorter hook is better. note that "event" is used rather than "race" because the event technically has two races.
Ok, this is still a few minutes away from hitting the main page but I shall post this under "current DYK". Breaking Barriers 50km – are we really sure that this is correctly titled without a non-breaking space between the number and the SI units disregarding the guidance given at MOS:UNITNAMES? Ping Dying (nominator), Onegreatjoke (reviewer), Cielquiparle (prep promoter), and RoySmith (queue promoter). Schwede6623:58, 24 May 2023 (UTC)Reply
Schwede66, most of the sources have been surprisingly inconsistent regarding what to call this race over the past three years, but i believe, during the last year, "Breaking Barriers" and "50km" have generally been used as part of the name. in particular, the official site and world athletics both do not use a space before the unit symbol. in addition, none of the sources cited use "50 km" in their titles.i was aware of mos:unitsymbols when i titled the article, but as "Breaking Barriers 50km" is a proper name and not a descriptive title, i believe mos:unitsymbols is not applicable in this case. however, i am not particularly certain about this point, so thanks for bringing this up. if mos:unitsymbols indeed overrides the style used in proper names, then i agree that a non-breaking space should be used. dying (talk) 01:52, 25 May 2023 (UTC)Reply
I would argue in this particular case, "50km" is part of a proper name, rather than a measurement of distance. The version of the name with a space should be a redirect. Also worth adding a note to the Talk page, etc., and embedded at the top so that other editors resist the temptation to move the article. Cielquiparle (talk) 03:34, 25 May 2023 (UTC)Reply
Yeah, I expected to hear that 'most sources use the unspaced version' and OFFICIALNAME. There are WP guidelines in other areas that encourage that minor stylistic issues get fixed rather than adopted. What comes closest, as least as far as I'm aware, is MOS:SIC. I don't feel too strongly about this either but thought it's worthwhile to be deliberate about it. And yes, once this discussion is over, we should probably copy it to the article's talk page. Schwede6605:33, 25 May 2023 (UTC)Reply
Jayron32, i admittedly don't think wp:titletm applies here. the race name already follows "standard English text formatting"; the practice of including a space before a unit symbol is not a standard rule of english text formatting, but a guideline in our own internal manual of style. in addition, versions of the name without a space before the unit symbol are collectively "demonstrably the most common usage in sources independent of the owner of the trademark". (in fact, it seems to be about the only thing about the race's name that reliable sources have generally agreed upon.) wp:titletm also addresses capitalization, which does not appear to be in question here. mos:tmrules, in addition to covering the aforementioned formatting and capitalization issues, also addresses the use of special characters. had the race used the stylization "ᛕᛖ", i would have agreed with you.interestingly, mos:tmrules also explicitly states to "not 'correct' the spelling, punctuation, diacritics, or grammar of trademarks to be different from anything found in reliable sources", and gives the example of "National Basketball Players Association" being correct, not "National Basketball Players' Association". to me, this actually seems to be a strong argument that "50km" should not be "corrected" to conform with mos:unitsymbols.Schwede66, i'm also glad that we are being deliberate about this now. i wasn't sure about this point when creating the article, but hadn't brought it up because i didn't know if the matter was important enough. surprisingly, Jayron32's reference to mos:tmrules now has me fairly convinced that mos:unitsymbols should not override, and Art LaPella has also helpfully linked to a discussion that i was previously unaware of. dying (talk) 21:18, 25 May 2023 (UTC)Reply