This article uses the following optional standards for Style elements.
Please help us maintain consistency in the article by following these standards:
Please do not change these settings unless consensus has been reached. |
This goes on the talk page, not in the article.
{{MoSElement
|ev=
|ci=
|bi=
|bc=
|sc=
|em=
|me=
|oth=
}}
Arguments (followed by results) are:
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.
{{MoSElement
|ev=ame
|ci=foot
|bi=apa
|bc=ce
|sc=y
|em=en
|me=na
|oth="[[Igbo people|Igbo]]" instead of "Ibo"
}}
results in:
This article uses the following optional standards for Style elements.
Please help us maintain consistency in the article by following these standards:
Please do not change these settings unless consensus has been reached. |
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:
==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.