User:Filelakeshoe/style tips

This is a list of things that make me twitch in article space:

1. "notable". The sneakiest way to try or to make something non-notable seem notable.
2. "you". I die a little every time I see it in article space, unless it's in a quote.
3. "arguably", e.g. "he is arguably one of the greatest footballers of his generation". This is a common way of sneaking a personal opinion into an article. Multiple RS are needed to source any such opinion, and negate the need for "arguably".
4. "etc.". Most of the time I see this in article space it means absolutely nothing, or makes an assumption that the reader knows what you're talking about.
5. "foreign"; the context had better be bloody well established for the scope to be maximised this much. 90% of the time I see this word, it hasn't been.
6. "simply". This is one I learned in my day job as a tech writer, but it applies on Wikipedia too. Overuse of "simply" is editorialising which belongs in tech press releases. See this talk.
7. "approximately" followed by a number like "54,801", "45.3726m", "69.23%". That's not an approximation.
8. "so-called" - this should be used extremely sparingly on Wikipedia as it sounds like a judgment. In some languages, the equivalent phrase is a pretty neutral attributive synonym for "known as", specifying that the following phrase is simply an established name, but in English it carries a connotation that the name is a misnomer or misleading and has the potential to come across as extremely offensive (e.g. "the so-called X genocide")
9. Overtranslation, including approximate translations which are inaccurate, e.g. Hermelín translated as Camembert. Czech restaurants do this (much to French cheese lovers' distaste) to save themselves from having to explain themselves. An encyclopedia's function is to explain itself.
10. I wish there were a bot which could auto-correct things like Hadjuk Split, Condoleeza Rice and Arnold Schwarzeneger.
11. People not being careful what they link to. Steve Jobs was not the founder of Apple and Opera is not your favourite web browser, Chicago is not showing at your local theatre, Goldie does not play jungle and Eric Prydz does not play house. We all obsess over not linking to disambiguation pages, but this is far far worse.
12. Nonsense written by electronic musicians and DJs with musical terms used incorrectly, e.g. "4/4" to mean four-to-the-floor, "3/4 rhythm" to refer to triplets, "pitch" or the acronym "bpm" to mean tempo.
13. Music genres capitalised incorrectly. The only time you capitalise any word in a music genre is if it is a proper noun: so Chicago house and Detroit techno, but minimal house and dub techno. See WP:GENRECAP.
14. "EDM music" and "IDM music". What does the M stand for again?
15. "whenever I see "England, United Kingdom" I am reminded of certain primary-school children who would continue that with "Europe, Earth, the Solar System, the Milky Way". --Redrose64 (talk) 16:21, 8 July 2014 (UTC) (diff)
16. IPA transcriptions that have only one syllable and mark stress. It's the IPA equivalent of writing numbers with pointless leading zeros.
17. If I could give every Czech contributor to en.wikipedia one piece of writing advice it would be to stop using "the year(s)" so often. "In 2007" and "from 2007 to 2010" or "between 2007 and 2010" are preferable to "in the year of 2007" and "between the years of 2007 and 2010". See Don Sparling.
18. Pipes to names with diacritics like [[Miloš Zeman|Milos Zeman]]. Like... seriously. You typed the name with diacritics. Just link to it.
19. If you are a linguistics student doing a school project here, please remember that Wikipedia is not only read by other generativists. Not everyone knows what "PRO" or "SPEC CP" or "LF" mean. Additionally, perhaps nobody has told you this, but there are other approaches to linguistics than generativism and in the interests of WP:NPOV you should always state what framework your analysis comes from.

    For a good example of how to write highly technical analysis for a lay audience, see Donkey_sentence#Analysis_of_donkey_sentences.

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See also

• Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Words to watch