 | This is an essay on the 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 guidelines for article layout, content formatting, and page naming. Facts on a subject should be drawn from reliable sources, but how content is styled is a matter for the Wikipedia community, which strongly favors the style found in general-audience works over highly specialized ones, because of the breadth of our audience. |
Why doesn't the Manual of Style always follow specialized practice?
Although Wikipedia contains some highly technical content, it is written for a general audience. While specialized publications in a field, such as academic journals, are excellent sources for facts, they are not always the best sources for or examples of how to present those facts to non-experts. When adopting style recommendations from external sources, the Manual of Style incorporates a substantial number of practices from technical standards and field-specific academic style guides; however, Wikipedia defaults to preferring general-audience sources on style, especially when a specialized preference may conflict with most readers' expectations, and when different disciplines use conflicting styles.
The specialized-style fallacy (SSF) is a set of flawed arguments that are used in Wikipedia style and titling discussions. The faulty reasoning behind the fallacy of specialized style is this: because the specialized literature on a topic is (usually) the most reliable source of detailed facts about the specialty, such as we might cite in a topical article, it must also be the most reliable source for deciding how Wikipedia should title or style articles about the topic and things within its scope. This fallacy is used to attempt to justify a "local consensus" of specializing editors, often a WikiProject, for specialized-sourced article naming and styling that other editors and readers (often not unfamiliar with the field) find strange, impenetrable, inappropriate, and/or grammatically incorrect.
It is also called the reliable sources style fallacy (RSSF), since it is an argument sometimes made by editors who "over-defer" to specialized works on style matters that are beyond the specialization's scope. The argument does not always depend on explicit reliable sources, and may instead take the form of an appeal to tradition and ipse dixitism (e.g. "that's just how it's done in this field"). This argument forgets that Wikipedia is not a specialized reference work, but is a general-audience encyclopedia. The RSSF is the flip side, the other extreme, of the common-style fallacy about mimicking the style of journalistic writing.
A secondary implication of either version of the fallacy, sometimes stated explicitly, is a straw man argument: that disagreement with specialized naming and style preferences is a criticism of specialized sources or even a direct attack on the specialty and editors who work in that particular field. This particular SSF variant is the specialist straw man (SSM).