User talk:SMcCandlish/LQ open letter to Darkfrog24
This was written for User talk:Darkfrog24 but a 6-mo. topic ban dropped while I was writing this, making the editor unable to respond to it any time soon, so I'm just dumping this here so I don't lose it. I invite a response by private e-mail if the other editor's willing.
Background post by Darkfrog24
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I believe my "editor-to-editor essay" below is constructive (and not just constructively critical), though necessarily in-depth given how long this debate has gone on. I think plenty of it is resolution-progressive if we allow it to be. If you still want me to bugger off, I will do so, but I think this is a valid use of user talk, a good faith attempt at dispute resolution. And it's fine that you didn't read most of the previous round; I'm not sure it covered anything new, while the following does, including details about exactly what the bases for some of my disagreements with you are, since they seem not to have been understood despite previous attempts to clarify them. I don't ask for or expect a reply, just that you take some time to mull over these matters. (Noetica and I had a dispute like this back when, and an exchange like this, laying it all out, and each sat on it for something like three months during a mutual WP:SHUN, and it actually worked really well, and ended virtually all of our disagreements). I'm also amenable to you refactoring it to my talk page, producing a response twice as long as this, or raising an individual point from it later, or whatever. Anything but more "I just think you're wrong and you just think I'm wrong" pattern. Explain why in terms that haven't been used before. Use metaphors or anything else you think will make your view clearer without simply restating what you said last time. If you feel insulted by something say so, without returning the perceived insult. I've endeavored to do that here. If we both try this, it should work much better.
Those two sources
editLet's look at your direct source links. First, [6] does not say anything about anything like "placement by position". The phrase doesn't really parse; "placement" is synonymous with "positioning", so you're effectively saying that the source calls for positioning by position, or placement by place, and it's tautological and meaningless. This is the kind of thing I mean when I've previously said things like "you're making up stuff again" or "that's just false". I concede that there are more politic ways to put it, and pissing you off isn't my goal in making those objections. The observation is not incorrect that what the source says and what you say it says do not agree. I'm 100% confident that an RfC or NORNB would agree with me on that. I don't know why you do this with sources – and WP:ARBATC#All parties reminded tells me not to theorize about that – it's just an objectively observable fact that you do it, with whatever sources you have, on a regular basis. It's a habit, not an insanity, or a wicked scheme; a habit that comes (speaking as an anthropologist by training, not pretending to be a mind-reader) from social, invested modes of approaching debate and proof, as in politics (including in academia) and civil law, not rigorous and abstracted ones like science and encyclopedic precision. Not absorbing and reflecting the difference is a major part of your difficulties here, which go beyond this micro-topic. (I also gather that you think I do this with sources, too. I'm also confident that a community review would side with my interpretation of these sources, since I'm not engaging in interpretation beyond the bare minimum necessary to actually use sources to write an encyclopedia, no where near the bounds of NOR. My interpretation disagrees with yours because my interpretation is consistent with the sources and yours conflicts with the sources, thus it will necessarily conflict with mine.)
Your supposedly contrary second source [7] doesn't say what you say it does either. You're mistaking JISS's "if the sense of the punctuation is part of the quotation" (note nothing at all in the source about "placement by grammatical sense" – you just invented that), for the Oxford, et al. rule to punctuate according to the sense of the quoting sentence. They're two different uses of "the sense of". If I say "the caster's bearings were off, and the cart would not roll" and "the caster's bearings were off, so the lure didn't even hit the pond", these uses of the phrase "the caster's bearings were off" have radically different meanings at every level other than "the" and "were". Do you understand now?
Both of the sources you cite, which are not actually in conflict at all, are advocating exactly the same rule: Include the punctuation if it was in the original, exclude it if it was not. Compare them side by side:
Punctuation marks are placed inside the quotation marks only if the sense of the punctuation is part of the quotation.
[A]ny punctuation included in the quotation was there in the original.
Exact same meaning, which can be expressed many other ways: "Do not add extraneous punctuation to, or change punctuation within, quoted material." "Preserve the punctuation found in the original source." "A terminal period or comma comes after the closing quotation mark unless it was quoted from the original author/speaker." "Never falsify quoted material, including any of its punctuation." "Copy-paste the text to be quoted, and do not change any punctuation inside it." And 50 other ways to say it. The only changes permitted in LQ, under any of its variously worded by functionally identical definitions, are those that are permitted in every quotation style ever documented: 1) you can truncate the quotation, including before an "offending" dot or comma that won't work with the quoting sentence; 2) you can use an ellipsis to indicate elided material; 3) you can use square brackets to make an editorial change (technically, including the insertion of extraneous punctuation, though this never seems to be done, since it's easier to just put it after the closing quotation mark). Exact house styles (in all the major quotation style "camps" have particular nitpicks to add, like whether to enclose the ellipsis in square brackets, etc. There are some super-extra-strict interpretations of LQ, but WP doesn't use them.
Is this the root cause of the dissonance?
editI now wonder if the root cause of all your confusions and angst on this for all these years has been because you're not noticing the marked distinction between the (not fantastically worded) JISS LQ formulation's sense of the punctuation in the original with several British style guides' non-LQ rules about sense of the sentence structure in the work doing the quoting. If so, I guess I can kinda-sorta understand because words can be ambiguous, but, well, seriously? This much strife over one house-style sheet? It's not like JISS actually matters much. (Obviously their "the sense of" clause could simply be dropped; "Punctuation marks are placed inside the quotation marks only if the sense of the punctuation is part of the quotation." conveys the meaning more concisely and with less chance of confusion. They probably retained it from having an early draft that used Oxford quotation, and modifying it over time, much the way WP articles often end up with clumsy sentences after several editors have tweaked the same line without proofreading carefully.)
The cherry-picking issues, since you ask
editNext: While your GBooks searches did not actually help you prove your point at all (though incidentally did allow us to figure out what the probable point of confusion is) they're not responsive to the cherry picking concern. The problems are largely in three areas:
- A) Cherry-picking what to use sources for: not recognizing that American style guides reliable on TQ/AQ – that just don't give a damn about the difference between LQ and the BQs and lump them together for their own convenience in passing – cannot possibly trump the reliable LQ sources and reliable BQ sources that actually definite those styles in detail, and do not define compatible styles. It is literally impossible for LQ and BQ to be the same, for the same reason that it cannot be true that planets and stars are the exact same thing just because someone looking at the sky can't tell one from the other, and so waves their hand and calls them all stars.
- B) Cherry-picking between superficial labeling and significant meaning, to use whichever suits your argument better at the time: This "label fixation" is WP:UNDUE weight, a classic case of it. It doesn't matter what a source choses to call something or what adjectives it wants to pin to it; what matters is the underlying, meaning-related facts of what these labels pertain to. The map is not the territory, the menu is not the meal. My cat is not a dog, even if I say he's a schnauzer and name him Fido. Your neighbor's twin sons are not the same kid, even if you can't personally tell them apart, and don't happen to have seen them both side by side.
- C) Cherry-picking particular passages from single sources, and then reinterpreting them on-the-fly to mean what you want them to mean instead of what they actually say. Your citation of CMoS above is a great case in point. You write 'The Chicago Manual of Style uses the term "British" for both rationales.' But what CMoS actually does is address British quotation styles (it says there are multiple variants) as defaulting to putting the quotation marks outside unless they were part of the original material, and then it observes that various exceptions to that rule apply in that style. That's actually an accurate description of the general mess that is real British quotation. It is not a standardized system at all. Even The Guardian article makes that clear by outlining how three or four British style manuals can't agree on how to approach this. CMoS does not call that logical quotation; you just assume it means logical quotation. But it cannot possibly be LQ, because no such exceptions exist in LQ, only in BQ! It's a self-disproving assumption if you will just stop for a moment and think about it. Worse yet (the main point of item "C" here), you ignore at least three other places CMoS describes, in a contextual not nationalized way, the use of logical quotation (it also doesn't use that label in these passages, either, but the descriptions and examples given are exactly logical quotation as defined in the LQ sources that do name it; recall above that the labelling is essentially irrelevant). This is just one example among many.
Just re-thinking about this briefly should dispel most of the dispute
editMore importantly here (being constructive, not suggesting further avenues of argument), if you realize that JISS does not say what you think it does, and CMoS doesn't either, then the entire cognitive dissonance about LQ and BQ just instantly vanishes. Your entire 'WTF is this British imposition on my American natural rights?' reaction is predicated on both the assumption that CMoS says LQ is British (it says no such thing) and that that LQ and BQ style guides define the same style (they obviously don't, since the British don't even define mutually consistent styles, and they define styles that permit changing periods into commas inside quotes, and/or vice versa, and/or inserting extraneous periods or commas, and/or various combinations of the above, depending on the exact guide in question, to suit "the sense" – the grammatical structure – of the quoting sentence, and LQ never permits any of that, by definition). If you absorb this, all that's left is that LQ isn't typical in American publications (nor in British ones). There's no more "British invasion" to rise up in arms against. You've been shadow boxing. And WP does all sorts of "minority" things that don't match every US/Canadian or British/Commonwealth English, because we have precision reasons for having such rules, so LQ being one more of these is not some big deal (not intrinsically, on that basis, anyway).
If you'd drop this wacky "LQ is British and therefore anti-American" shtick, people might actually take you seriously if you had some "we should abandon LQ because the arguments in favor of it are insufficient to surmount the arguments for making punctuation be left to editorial discretion" argument to present instead, without all the bogus, nationalistic ENGVAR posturing. We have lots of "FOOVARs", and only one of them has anything to do with nationality. The national one you've tied your horse to has very clearly totally failed you. Your entire open-mouth-insert-and-shoot-foot problem is you've got a position against LQ that's not nuts (even if not strong, either), and you're commingling it with a house-of-cards fantasy about the nature of LQ that is patently nonsensical; it's self-disproving twice over. Look at it this way: If you'd been the discoverer of the theory of relativity, do you believe that anyone would have taken it seriously if your main arguing point for it was that it must be true because a purple demon named Corky told you it was? No one will listen to rational propositions that are commingled with self-evident nonsense, and the harder you push the nonsense the more people will write you off as a crank and seek to exclude you from participation. Disagreement with LQ on practical grounds is actually rational; I don't agree with the rationale, but it's not implausible like {{{1}}} is. If you've been using this lame-argument-glued-to-possibly-sensible-one tactic on purpose because you realize the non-silly argument is weak, I would hope by now that you realize that adding the lame one to it just makes it weaker, and has turned people against listening to you at all.
I also concede it's possible that I'm somehow just wildly missing something crucial about your viewpoint or evidence, and am open to being corrected on that.
Loose ends
editWrapping up the small stuff, and trying not to react much to the civility problems:
- 'I'm going to give you far more benefit of the doubt than you deserve and assume that you actually don't understand what you're doing wrong.' See psychological projection again. This is virtually a copy-paste of what everyone has been saying to you in and about the AE case
- Well, other than the uncivil "than you deserve" bit. Same goes for "You are really making me wonder what is wrong with you", and loads of other aspersion-casting. Just because you think it doesn't mean you have to type it. It seems that you simply don't know what aspersion-casting is in WP terms and why it's prohibited and increasingly being enforced against. Any time you express assumptions or theories about another editors's mental state, mental capabilities, or motivations, you're doing it. It's prohibited because, well, it's childish and shitty. I say that as someone who used to do it without thinking about it, and got sanctioned for it, and realized I was being a WP:JERK when I did it. Save us all the trouble and come to this realization without having to be sanctioned for it first. That said, I actually retract my above promise to make an ANI case out of it if you did it again. In retrospect, I was self-bluffing. My distaste for ANI is too high and my genuine irritation level with your accusations, insinuations, insults and attacks isn't quite high enough yet to surmount that.
- 'I am sick of trying to be nice to you.' That has a lot to do with why you're running into hard times here. Wikipedians never get sick of being nice to each other. And accusing me of AGF failures, without evidence, four times in the same 24-hour period isn't "nice", anyway. My skin's pretty thick. I object to it when you do things like this, but I don't run waa-waa-waa to ANI about it. The only time (unless I forgot one) I've ever initiated a noticeboard action about your behavior, despite being frustrated enough to diff and draft one half a dozen times, is when you were directly editwarring at MoS itself and then started doing it mainspace to make our article support your MoS views; i.e. you were doing stuff that negatively affects the project, not just me. This is also why I support you being required to take a break from this topic for a spell; the disruption negatively affects the project. Loads and loads of people "get their way" against positions I take on this or that, but they're not tendentious, so I just shrug and move on. Me "winning" is not a strong motivation for me. Being understood is, at the interaction level, and the project working well is, at the bigger-picture level. That said, I repeat that I'd support the TB ending if you produce at WP:STANDARDOFFER request that actually addresses the concerns raised by the AE admins and other respondents. I really don't have anything against you personally.
- GBooks searches are not actually very helpful for this kind of research, as you've probably concluded by now. Aside from false positives, most of the actually reliable sources on such matters are not text-indexed in that system. I don't know what fraction of a fraction of a fraction of 1% of available books they have snippet views of, but it verges on statistically insignificant. This research has to be done the hard way. This also points out why reliance on primarily online sources doesn't work on this kind of topic. Most of the RS are paper only, most of those that are not are non-free (even damned expensive) eBooks. This subject has to be researched the old-fashioned way for the most part, and inter-library loan is your good buddy. Anyway, your GBooks searches were guaranteed to net poor results because the "quotation mark" search term will mostly find results for glyphs, not punctuation order.
- "Typesetters' quotation": Again, don't fixate on labeling. It's just a descriptive term. Other synonymous ones are typesetting, typographic, typographical, printers', printer-style, aesthetic, traditional, historical, etc. Several of them overlap with descriptions of curly glyphs vs. straight ones (easily distinguished in most cases though, by a difference in phrasing like "typographers' quotation marks" for glyphs vs. "typographers' quotation style" for the punctuation placement). I've already done piles and piles of these searches and refined them. You've sucked up so much of my time in circular flailing that I've had little time to do anything with much of what I've dug up.
- 'I added "Use caution when challenging this rule" and you claimed I was trying to encourage people to challenge it.' And I stand by the gist of that (though it wasn't my exact wording). The purpose of the MOS FAQ is to provide answers to frequently asked questions, not to inject WP:BEANS into people's noses hinting that our guidelines should be challenged. "Use caution when challenging this rule" is just like your promise to back the new guy's RfC if he'll do one, then faux-warning to the new guy him about how big a fight an RfC can be with people you've worked hard to convince him are "bullies". The average incoming netizen, used to the Internet being That Place to Stick It to People Who Are Wrong, is apt to take such planted bean seeds as "
<thememusic style="first-person shooter video game">Do you have what it takes to dominate this thrilling game? You know how awesome it is to frag asshats who really need to be put in their place! Can you handle this challenge and win?! Step right up – if you dare!</thememusic>We don't need that.
Opinion, background, perception, approach
editMy opinion has little to do with anything here (I know I've said that before, but I'll elaborate this time). It's all simply sources and taking them at face value (though not to the point of stupidity or faux-stupidity), instead of trying to make them mean what I or anyone else might want them to mean. When sources that define style LQ and sources that define styles BQ1–BQ8 define different things (and even the BQs don't agree in their own camp), it doesn't matter that sources that define style TQ ("AQ") don't notice the difference. My approach to this is different from yours precisely because I have no external opinion to inject on which style is "right"; I think it's a silly notion to assert such a thing about a variable linguistic matter to begin with, and the entire science of linguistics agrees with me. I have used several different quotation styles professionally, and I always adjust my style to whatever the house style is of what I'm writing for. I've gotten used to LQ here (and was familiar with it before, from a house-organ Internet-and-law publication I edited), so I use it here out of habit, even in talk. But if I write a letter to the editor of the local paper, I'll use TQ, because that's what they want and will editorially impose anyway. If I write to a British or South African or whatever publication, I'll use their version of BQ, if I can "suss it out".
But you have a deep personal conviction, a Faith-like certainty about quotation styles and their "rightness" along nationalized lines. This is an external opinion that has nothing to do with why WP should use one style or another for its own purposes. WP is a private organization, and its internal governance is entirely up to the consensus of its constituent members. This includes – perhaps especially includes – how this big writing project agrees to write consistently. It's like you're trying to import a baseball rule into a football game, oor impose a rule from 3M Corporation's bylaws onto the Free Software Foundation.
Part of the reason for the prescriptive vs. descriptive difference between us is surely because of your background in scholastic copy editing (a decidedly prescriptive endeavor), vs. my educational background in linguistics and anthropology, and my professional background in both expository writing (more so than editing others), and technical documentation (among many other things, including political activism and media relations a.k.a PR, which is why I can smell advocacy a mile away). An obvious way around your issue with LQ on WP would be to treat it like any other style requirement of any other organization. You are not picketting APA, AMA, MLA, MHRA, AP, etc. to change anything about their style advice to do things your preferred way. Or treat it like the house style of any other publisher. You would not send angry letters to Nature, the Journal of the American Historical Society, or BBC News telling them their stylesheet is "wrong" and refusing to abide by it while also demanding that they both publish your work and let you rewrite their rules whether they like it or not. It's time to stop doing the equivalent things here.
I do recognize that you feel that LQ and many other things should be ENGVAR matters, and understand the arguments for that. You've also received the arguments against that. The TL;DR version: ENGVAR and the other FOOVARs apply when WP doesn't care; but WP does care about some style matters, including literal quotation accuracy. You can dispute that this is a good enough rationale, but the rationale exists independently of how you feel about it, and it is not tied to any off-WP concerns or interest group.
If I did approach MOS from that sort of external-opinion basis/bias, I could have gone down the unhappy trail you've been following, except my campaign would be against the unfathomably wretched practice of using sentence case for titles, section headings, and table headers, which I detest with such intensity that it very literally raises my blood pressure when I think about it. But I virtually never mention it, and have not tried to change it in something like 9 years. I accept that we have a consensus for it for nit-picky reasons, that I did not prevail against it when I tried, and that consensus is unlikely to change any time soon. I don't agree with the reasons, and even if I did, I would not agree that they outweigh other concerns. But I accept that I've been overruled on this. I let it go, and trust that the community is collectively smart enough to eventually realize how stupid and unprofessional this looks (except to a handful of specialties that actually prefer this style in academic journals), and that it confuses readers, so we'll eventually change it, without me being a pain in the ass about it in the interim. I'm mindful of WP:5THWHEEL: WP doesn't need me, much less need me personally to crusade for that particular change. And it's just one of many things in MoS that would piss me off very severely if I let it. I simply don't. MOS isn't here to be "right" in an off-WP way, it's here to be a playbook we work under, nothing more. The rules of the game matter much less than the agreement that they're our rules and we'll use them, so we can actually play the game, not stand on the field talking about how great it would be to play the game if only we'd just agree to do it. If WP consensus changed (genuinely, and based on facts, not confusions) to no longer use LQ, I would just add that to my list of things I won't permit to irritate me, and move on. That list is way longer than people think. There are any number of MoS points I defend in a devil's-advocate manner, because the stability is more important than my own peeves being satisfied. Not just MoS matters, either. Given free reign, I'd change a lot of policies and procedures in minor but "future-proofing" ways. I've decided the real way to do this is to write presentations for upcoming Wikiconferences and sow the ideas with the most active, most community-oriented editors.
Conclusion
editHopefully this will provide food for thought and some common ground later. I know it's too much to respond point-by-point to, and that's much of the idea. This is a personal essay/letter for you, laying out entirely where I'm coming from on all of this – "full disclosure" – not a fight-with-me-more invitation. I'd rather see something like this from you in turn. "Your story" on this whole matter. I promise that I will also think about what you've said already (and may say in response to this, now or later). Or you can just ignore it. It's been constructive for me to write it, since it helps gel how to approach some of the source interpretation problems (both how to actually interpret them within NOR bounds as necessary to use the material at all, and how to forestal OR attempts to interpret them in the WP:AEIS sense).
PS: If you come back to it later and want to respond to particular things, feel free to refactor as needed (e.g., just copy-paste my sig below above where ever you insert commentary so the attribution doesn't get muddled).
— SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼ 17:01, 22 January 2016 (UTC)