Template:MoSElement

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Usage

This goes on the talk page, not in the article.

<syntaxhighlight lang="wikitext">

</syntaxhighlight> Arguments (followed by results) are:

• ev (English variety/dialect)
  • ame = American English
  • aus = Australian English
  • bri = British English
  • can = Canadian English
• ci (citation style, in the sense of where citations are placed and how they are cross-referenced in the main text)
  • embed = Embedded citations
  • foot = Footnotes
  • harv = Harvard referencing
  • mlap = MLA parentheses
• bi (bibliography style, in the sense of how information is formatted within reference citations)
  • wik = WP Templates
  • apa = APA
  • chi = CMoS
  • mla = MLA
  • na = Not applicable (or just leave it blank or remove it)
• bc (era annotation)
  • ad = BC/AD
  • ce = BCE/CE
  • na = Not applicable (or just leave it blank or remove it)
• sc (serial comma usage)
  • y = Include
  • n = Exclude
• em (dash style, for dashes serving a parenthetical function in a sentence)
  • en = Spaced en dash
  • em = Unspaced em dash
• me (preferred units-of-measure system, with the other given as parenthetical conversions)
  • met = Metric
  • imp = "Imperial" (now mostly US)
  • na = Not applicable (or just leave it blank or remove it)
• oth (additional options)
  • This is a spot for free-form notes about additional options not covered in the above fields. Keep them concise.

Any other argument or no argument at all gives a blank response. If a style matter has not been established at an article yet, the parameter for it can be omitted or left blank; there are no default values.

Example

<syntaxhighlight lang="wikitext">

</syntaxhighlight>

results in:

Misuse

This template – for use on talk pages only - exists to inform editors of consensus established at an article (explicitly through discussion or implicitly through consistent post-stub writing style in the article). It does not exist to enable "article ownership"-style behavior, and cannot be used to thwart consensus or to stake out a personal preference that does not suit the article context, especially against the objections of multiple editors.

Because this template describes consensus and does not magically create it, do not use parameters to try to "set" standards for an article in which a particular choice has not yet been standardized. E.g., if the article contains no units of measure and no BC/BCE dates (nor AD/CE ones that use those abbreviations), the |me= and |era= parameters of this template should be left blank or omitted.

The prevailing guidelines:

• MOS:RETAIN: "If it's not broke, don't 'fix' it." If one optional style is already consistent in an article, changing to another option should only be contemplated for good reason and not be done arbitrarily or simply out of personal preference.
• MOS:ENGVAR: The English variety (dialect) used in an article should be consistent, but should not be changed to another unless there is a strong national tie between the subject and a particular country, and the writing in the article is a mismatch.
• MOS:DATEVAR: The DMY or MDY date order should not be changed without good reason after consistently established (though inconsistent dates should be normalized). While it is most common for US-English articles to use MDY and most others to use DMY, there is not a one-to-one correspondence (e.g. MDY is also common in some other English-speaking countries, including Canada, and the US military uses DMY, so articles in that category often do also).
• WP:CITEVAR: While the general default is to use Wikipedia's citation style 1 templates for citations, to embed citation code inline in the article text, to add reference citations without any verbose annotations (like "(Smith 2020)") in the main content, and to have a single section (==References==) for rendering the bibliography, there are no rules requiring any of these. A consistently used citation style established in an article should not be changed without good reason (and usually a talk-page consensus discussion). Many articles on scientific, technical, humanities, and other topics use the most common citation style found in academic journals devoted to that topic, and this permitted by design on Wikipedia.

In-article consistency: In all of these cases, isolated instances in an article that conflict with the style that is otherwise already consistently established should be normalized to that article-wide style, and any article with wildly conflicting styles should be normalized to an appropriate and consistent one. Consistency between separate articles is not necessary.

Note also that not all style choices that may seem arbitrary and unlikely to change actually are so. For example, serial commas should be used any time they improve clarity, and should be used consistently within an article. Consequently, the more complex an article becomes the more likely that serial commas will be needed, therefore serial commas are increasingly used site-wide, even though MoS does not require them. Similarly, the use of unspaced em dashes is apt to be more difficult to read than spaced em dashes in complex material, because it runs words tightly together and in many fonts becomes difficult to distinguish from hyphenated terms, en-dashed expressions like Dunning–Kruger effect, etc. Thus, spaced en dashes – for parenthetical use, like this – are increasingly common on Wikipedia. Use of this template has no impact on such readability decisions, and it is important to remember that we are writing for the readership, not for ourselves.

Redirects

• Template:MOSElement (redirect page) ‎ (links)
• Template:MoS Element (redirect page) ‎ (links)
• Template:MOS Element (redirect page) ‎ (links)

The above documentation is transcluded from Template:MoSElement/doc. (edit | history)
Editors can experiment in this template's sandbox (create | mirror) and testcases (create) pages.
Add categories to the /doc subpage. Subpages of this template.