 | This is an essay on Wikipedia:Article titles policy and the Wikipedia:Manual of Style guideline. It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. This page is not an encyclopedia article, nor is it one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, as it has not been thoroughly vetted by the community. Some essays represent widespread norms; others only represent minority viewpoints. |
 | This page in a nutshell: Wikipedia has its own set of policies and guidelines for article content and naming (which are distinct from each other). Facts on a subject are drawn from reliable sources, but no particular subset of them dictates how Wikipedia must write. Style is a matter of Wikipedia community consensus, based on general-audience style guides, not mimicry of any particular genre (or trademark). |
"Wikipedia's Manual of Style contains some conventions that differ from those in some other, well-known style guides and from what is often taught in schools. Wikipedia's editors have discussed these conventions in great detail and have reached consensus that these conventions serve our purposes best. ...
Wikipedia ... is written for a general audience. ... When adopting style recommendations from external sources, the Manual of Style incorporates a substantial number of practices from [other] style guides; however, Wikipedia defaults to preferring general-audience sources on style, especially when ... different disciplines use conflicting styles."
The common-style fallacy (CSF) is the flawed reasoning that if a particular typographic stylization turns up commonly in newspapers, blogs, and other popular publications with a less formal register of English usage than the precise language of encyclopedic writing, that the newsy or bloggy stylization is the best or only way to write about the topic in question, and must be used on Wikipedia. Also more narrowly identifiable as the news-style fallacy (NSF), it is the flip side, the opposite extreme, of the specialized-style fallacy about narrowly topical, academic and insider publications.