Misplaced Pages

Revision as of 06:21, 28 June 2018

Manual of Style

This page falls within the scope of the Misplaced Pages:Manual of Style, a collaborative effort focused on enhancing clarity, consistency, and cohesiveness across the Manual of Style (MoS) guidelines by addressing inconsistencies, refining language, and integrating guidance effectively.Manual of StyleWikipedia:WikiProject Manual of StyleTemplate:WikiProject Manual of StyleManual of Style This page falls under the contentious topics procedure and is given additional attention, as it closely associated to the English Misplaced Pages Manual of Style, and the article titles policy. Both areas are subjects of debate. Contributors are urged to review the awareness criteria carefully and exercise caution when editing. For information on Misplaced Pages's approach to the establishment of new policies and guidelines, refer to WP:PROPOSAL. Additionally, guidance on how to contribute to the development and revision of Misplaced Pages policies of Misplaced Pages's policy and guideline documents is available, offering valuable insights and recommendations.

Historical note. This page, Misplaced Pages:Manual of Style/Mathematics, was obtained by moving here content from Misplaced Pages:WikiProject Mathematics, see the diff. As such, this page was not created from scratch on 18:39, 19 January 2005 as one may think from the page history, but is rather the product of collaborative discussion of Wikipedians since 2001 or 2002.

Archives

Archive 1 Archive 2 Archive 3 Archive 4 Archive 5

This page has archives. Sections older than 30 days may be automatically archived by Lowercase sigmabot III.

• WT:MSM

LaTeX (like ${\displaystyle {\binom {10}{5}}+e^{\pi }}$) in section headings

According to the main page, LaTeX won't render in section headings, but this seems not to be the case anymore. Whether or not it's a good idea otherwise is another issue, but it seems like we should update this. Thoughts? --Deacon Vorbis (talk) 14:55, 5 July 2017 (UTC)

Latex renders in section headings (at least in some browsers), but, if a section heading contents some latex, links to this section do not work properly. As an example, you may try to reach to this section by clicking on the arrow in the entry of this page in your watchlist. Thus latex in headings must be strongly discouraged. D.Lazard (talk) 15:45, 5 July 2017 (UTC)

I don't have any problem following the TOC link to this section, however links to here in the page history do not work (e.g., see D.Lazard's revision of 5 July 2017‎ — this seems to merely be a problem with how the links are formed in the edit summary box). The associated "" link works fine to enable editing of this section. And while the anchor text is quite bizarre looking: #LaTeX_(like_%7F'"`UNIQ--postMath-00000001-QINU`"'%7F)_in_section_headings, wikilinks formed using it do actually seem to work. - dcljr (talk) 05:47, 2 December 2017 (UTC)

Markup for math variables

Please see Misplaced Pages talk:Manual of Style/Text formatting#Mathematics variables section is wrong and needs updating

Indenting

@SMcCandlish: I object to using {{in5}}, which uses multiple nonbreaking spaces to indent what follows, for indenting displayed math content. Unfortunately, the "obvious" <math style="margin-left:2em"> doesn't seem to be supported (perhaps a Phabricator task should be opened about this?). A simple TeX-based solution would be to start the math content with an initial "\quad\ " (a quad followed by a space):

${\displaystyle \quad \ \int _{0}^{\pi }\sin x\,dx}$

Colon-provided indent, for comparison.

There might be a better (if not more convenient) TeX-based solution if I thought about / researched it a bit. Opinions? Suggestions? - dcljr (talk) 06:19, 2 December 2017 (UTC)

Then do that. Just don't given wrong HTML advice. PS: There's nothing wrong or objectionable about what I wrote; MoS doesn't care at all about non-rendered whitespace in wikicode, and there's nothing invalid about it. We do not have a rule to compress away whitespace in wikicode, and shouldn't have one, since we often use it to good effect. For every person who would object to the version I use there are probably 1+ who prefer it because it makes it easier to find the math markup in the source. I don't really care either way as long as we stop mis-advising abuse of list markup for non-lists, which is an accessibility problem.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >ⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ<  06:24, 2 December 2017 (UTC)

(Ignoring your second sentence, which makes it sound like I'm the one who was giving editors the "wrong" advice…) There is actually something very wrong with the {{in5}} approach. Look at the HTML it actually outputs: "<p>&#160; &#160; &#160;" (alternating non-breaking and regular spaces). This means long math content can actually be bumped to the next line, resulting in no indenting at all. In any case, I'm glad you see my suggestion as a viable alternative. What say other users? (In the meantime, shall we revert your change, SMcCandlish, until a better approach is found?) - dcljr (talk) 06:46, 2 December 2017 (UTC)

Then fix the template or use a different one. No-wrapping the spaces that template uses is a trivial fix, and there's probably another one that more sensibly does this with CSS padding. The point is, do something other that abuse of list markup. No, we shouldn't revert it, because abuse of list markup like that is, well, abusive, while the consequence of a long math content wrapping to a new line without an indent is just a line without an indent which isn't invalid, just not perfect. I've asked the Lua handlers of {{in5}} to fix the wrapping issue.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >ⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ<  08:35, 2 December 2017 (UTC)

Oh, duh. I actually wrote the ideal template for this, and forgot: {{blockindent}}. Just tried that, and it works fine. No blank line needed, either. (I created this originally as a {{blockquote}} replacement for material that isn't a quotation).  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >ⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ<  08:38, 2 December 2017 (UTC)

The standard way to indent in mathematics articles is to use colons, and this page should reflect that. I am not sure I know of any math article that uses templates for indenting displayed math formulas. The HTML generated is irrelevant to this point - "colon" in wikitext means "indent", not "dd", and at any point Mediawiki could switch from "dd" to anything else that achieves an indentation. It is not in any way an abuse of wikitext to use colons to indent content. — Carl (CBM · talk) 15:08, 2 December 2017 (UTC)

Using something other than a colon is probably semantically better, but it's hard to see justifying the change at this point. On a different but related topic, I was wondering about the practice of having blank lines before and after indented equations. Doing so seems to help readability while editing, but again, semantically it would seem to be wrong, because it indicates paragraph breaks where there shouldn't be any. I don't know of a good way around this, but maybe it's worth thinking about along with the above. –Deacon Vorbis (carbon • videos) 15:27, 2 December 2017 (UTC)

I would agree about the spacing issue if the blank lines had an effect on page spacing, but I don't think they do, looking at the source of this from my sandbox: . In general displayed math should not start a new textual paragraph, of course.

Regarding the colons, I think the key issue is that semantically, colons mean "indent" in wikicode. So the concern is not with the semantics of the wikicode but with the current implementation of those semantics, which is not an issue I think we need to worry about as editors. But moreover the very well established standard is to use colons, not some other template, for indenting displayed math. — Carl (CBM · talk) 15:36, 2 December 2017 (UTC)

Er, well, actually colon means "here is the definition part of a definition list". It just happens to be the case that that meaning causes things to be indented. I think that "indent something" is far more frequent than "definition part of a definition list" as the intended meaning by the editors using it, and that it would be a good idea for the Wikimedia engine to use semantic coding that reflects that, but it doesn't. In the meantime, if you want semantic purity, there's always <math display="block">, e.g.

$${\displaystyle E=mc^{2}}$$

(But there is no way that I know of to use that to get more than one indent, e.g. to match the indentation of this comment.) —David Eppstein (talk) 03:11, 3 December 2017 (UTC)

Yes. It definitely does not mean indent; we just abuse it for that on talk pages because we're lazy.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >ⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ<  06:50, 3 December 2017 (UTC)

Depends on what you're trying to do. For what we've been talking about:

{{block indent|1=Your math here.}}
{{block indent|{{block indent|1=Further-indented math here.}}}}
emits:

For simple stuff (but requires either a blank line or a <br /> preceding it, and indents less by default):
{{in5}}Your math here.<br />
{{in5}}{{in5}}Further-indented math here.<br />
or
{{in5|10}}Further-indented math again.<br />
yields:
     Your math here.
          Further-indented math here.
or
          Further-indented math again.

Neither of these produce bogus list markup, but the {{in5}} stuff can wrap such that the math is non-indented, as someone noted above, if the math content is long (or the viewport is tiny). There are also other indentation templates, but they are also space-based like {{in5}}. The most robust is the {{block indent}} approach.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >ⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ<  06:50, 3 December 2017 (UTC)

PS: You can also use {{block indent|left=X}} where X is an value in em units, to change the indent spacing (e.g. to make it match regular list indentation instead of blockquote indentation, or to indent further instead of using a block indent nested in a block indent. Another approach to the first example would be to open a block indent, put the first math, then do another block indent, do the extra-indented math, then close both block indents. That would be "cleaner", unless you need some non-indented text between the indented and extra-indented material, e.g. to introduce the second example.

I'm not sure why you'd want to have math examples indented to different levels in the first place, though.
 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >ⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ<  06:54, 3 December 2017 (UTC)

I think David E. buried the lead a bit: it appears that <math display="block"> is exactly what we've been looking for. Getting it to be generally accepted by editors is, of course, a totally different matter. I agree (with the implication of SMcCandlish's last comment) that indenting displayed math beyond one level is probably a relatively rare requirement in articles, but I imagine there are probably several legit examples lying around. In those cases, {{block indent}} looks like an acceptable approach:

(assuming, of course, that it's not more appropriate to handle the formatting inside the TeX content itself).

BTW, the template-inside-template approach shown above to get further indenting is not necessary, since {{block indent}} has an em parameter to control how far to go (in ems, of course):

{{block indent|em=4|<math>f(x)=|x|</math>}}

Yay. - dcljr (talk) 08:16, 3 December 2017 (UTC)

• Comment. Please note that changes such as this, which mandate a different way than the norm for all mathematics articles out there, including all mathematics featured articles and good articles, requires very strong consensus. The last time this issue was raised at WT:WPM, there was no consensus for a change. Similarly to this discussion, the change was imperialistically imposed on high by editors who do not routinely need to edit mathematics articles. Templates and display blocks are simply not as convenient for editors as colons, which have been used for indentation in Misplaced Pages since the very early days. (See WP:INDENTATION, Help:Talk, as well as the history of this guideline.) Even the alleged "violation" of WP:ACCESS is spurious: "This is not ideal for accessibility or semantics, but is currently in wide use." That guideline then gives guidance on how to use colons for indentation purposes! Consensus should be established with a formal RfC, as I said the last timme this issue was raised. Sławomir Biały (talk) 12:39, 3 December 2017 (UTC)

A couple further quick observations: If you're manually setting the indentation size (like the 4em above), you're almost surely doing it wrong. If any change is made, it should probably produce something that's at least very close to what a colon produces. Otherwise, we'll have pages with mixed amount of indentation as new stuff is added. Alternatively, someone could come up with a very thoroughly tested solution for converting automatically. –Deacon Vorbis (carbon • videos) 13:02, 3 December 2017 (UTC)

It it also very easy to find featured articles, such as Californium, which use colons for indentation. That is the standard way of indenting displayed formulas, is the only way in Help:Wikitext, and is explicitly allowed by WP:ACCESS. The real solution to access issues is get the developers to stop Mediawiki emitting dd/dl lists when colons are used for indentation, rather than trying to avoid using indentation wikicode to indent things in wikicode. In general, though, if we are looking at the HTML being emitted, we are doing it wrong. Editors work with wikicode, and the the HTML is the problem of the developers. — Carl (CBM · talk) 13:33, 3 December 2017 (UTC)

WP:OTHERSTUFF and WP:NODEADLINE.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >ⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ<  13:37, 3 December 2017 (UTC)

@SMcCandlish: I think Carl's remarks are entirely relevant and do not raise the spectre of WP:OTHERSTUFF. OTOH, your repeated reverting of the project page back to your preferred version suggests you think there is a DEADLINE in getting these guidelines changed. Please try to gain some kind of consensus before making such a major change to the guidelines. (Yes, I see the VP discussion linked below.) @Deacon Vorbis: The specific "4em" example I used above was only to get the mathematics at the third level of indenting. I assume that "almost never" happens in articles. @CBM: Considering the HTML that actually gets generated can help to decide which wikicode approach is better than another, or whether an approach can be improved (as just happened with the {{in5}} template/module). As for developer-involved solutions, I think a more realistic approach (rather than deprecating or reimplementing colon-indenting) may be to work towards a <math>-only solution for indenting mathematical content in particular. I've opened a new subsection for this below. - dcljr (talk) 11:36, 4 December 2017 (UTC)

Accessibility versus convenience in indentation (RfC at VPPOL)

Please see: Misplaced Pages:Village pump (policy)#RfC: Accessibility versus convenience in indentation
 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >ⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ<  13:37, 3 December 2017 (UTC)

Extending math element functionality

Like I said above (although not to this level of precision), just using display="block" seems to give exactly the same indenting as a single colon (does anyone see otherwise?):

${\displaystyle |x|}$

$${\displaystyle |x|}$$ These are, respectively, coded as:

• :<math>|x|</math>
• <math display="block">|x|</math>

This tells me that it is not unreasonable to consider implementing the indenting of math content with the display="block" approach. (Again, as I suggested above, having the option and requiring it are two different things. Here I'm discussing having the option to indent in the math element itself. Also remember that MediaWiki features are used in wikis other than those hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation. Mathematically oriented wikis may actually like the idea of colon-less indenting of math content.)

Unfortunately, the way display="block" is currently implemented appears to result in bad HTML: paragraph opened before a <div> element then closed after it. Given this, I'm not sure I understand what the thinking was when the feature was originally proposed/implemented (since "displayed" math almost always occurs inside a paragraph, yet a <div> element cannot). Perhaps someone knows where this was discussed? The only thing I've been able to find is mw:Extension:Math/Displaystyle, which doesn't have any real discussion.

Another, more serious, problem is that the page I just linked to reveals that on the MediaWiki wiki, display="block" results in centered displayed math (just like in TeX), not displayed math indented to the level of one colon! (Waaah…)

Notwithstanding all of the above, indenting to the level of however-many colons could be implemented in the <math> element with new syntax. This very idea came up back in December 2008 (phab:T18829) and was quickly nixed (within 14 hours!) by a developer (Brion, the only other user to comment on the bug), but opinions can change in 9 years, so maybe the idea would not be dismissed out of hand if some kind of consensus were reached about what the syntax might look like.

The proposer in 2008 seemed to be suggesting:

• <math indent=number>

where number is the number of "colons" of indenting to apply (0 would mean no indenting, which the proposer said would be the default and mean inline display — I would lean toward having 0 mean non-indented but still "displayed" math ).

Another possibility is to put it inside the display attribute:

• <math display="indent">

for displayed math with one-level indent;

• <math display="indent:number">

for displayed math with number-level indent (0 or more, 0 meaning aligned to left margin).

I could probably come up with other possibilities, but I've been typing this up for an insane amount of time already. I need to go to sleep. - dcljr (talk) 11:36, 4 December 2017 (UTC)

In principle I do not object to mentioning <math display="block">, but share your concern that if this is supposed to be the solution that leads to completely valid html, that it might fail at that. Sławomir Biały (talk) 11:41, 4 December 2017 (UTC)

Re "Perhaps someone knows where this was discussed?": https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T111712, I think, and before that at Misplaced Pages:VisualEditor/Feedback/Archive 2015 3#Indentation for mathematical equations. —David Eppstein (talk) 11:44, 4 December 2017 (UTC)

Yep, there it is… lots of prior discussion. For the record, there is also phab:T6521 for discussion about changing the way MW handles colon-indenting and semicolon-bolding outside the context of a deflist.

Interestingly, phab:T111712 mentions the possibility of creating:

• <dmath>

as an abbreviation for <math display="block">, an approach I think is particularly promising. Someone else (in the task) objected to creating a new tag, but I think it's a pretty neat solution. The new tag could then be used along with sitewide style sheets to style displayed math as either indented or centered, as desired by the wiki (IOW, whichever alignment is chosen as the "default default", a wiki could change it to the other default alignment in their site's CSS).

And then

• <imath>

could be created for inline math (display="inline"), and no already existing uses of <math> would need to be changed to get the benefit of the kinds of "logical" changes people have wanted to make to the behavior of <math> (e.g., that inline math should use inline styling by default, and displayed math should use display styling — this change would bring wikicode math much closer to the way TeX/LaTeX does it, which many technical folks would likely welcome). All current math content would continue to work the same way it does now, and instances of <math> could be slowly changed to <imath> or <dmath>, as appropriate, in the normal course of editing. (The <math> tag would remain a viable option into the future.) Unfortunately, I have no idea whether having three different tags as "entry points" to the same underlying code would cause any kind of problem from the developers' side. I would hope not. (Note that the display="block" and display="inline" functionality already exists. The change would be the use of the new tags and having different defaults for the two situations.) - dcljr (talk) 23:25, 4 December 2017 (UTC)

Something like this sounds like a great idea. It would be better to do it with CSS indentation (demoed here with margin:left) rather than by changing the content type to a block element, since we can't guarantee the context; a block element wouldn't be valid inside an inline element like <span>...</span>.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >ⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ<  08:14, 11 December 2017 (UTC)

Probably it would be easier just for Math to nix the opening paragraph HTML when it's in display form. I submitted phab:T182041 for that issue. As for display math, I think it makes more sense to do something like phab:T182673 which I submitted today. I dislike the imath solution because it a) adds tags for the same semantic information and b) because the solution should work with chem as well as math without an even larger number of tags. --Izno (talk) 12:47, 12 December 2017 (UTC)

Good point.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >ⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ<  15:52, 12 December 2017 (UTC)

This is an idea, but it requires things to be in math tags, while of course many formulas are formatted in plain wikitext, because of article-by-article decisions. For example, the display in californium ("History"). We also have to be careful, technically, with displayed equations that have math tags and additional text outside of math tags, as in ROT13 ("Description"). I think that fixing the output for colons in Mediawiki seems like a more comprehensive solution, because that would fit many more use cases, compared to looking just at the math tag. — Carl (CBM · talk) 13:11, 12 December 2017 (UTC)

Surely true, but after a decade, it seems clear there's a great inertia with regard to the colon/dd markup, and it's probably easier to get <math> and <chem> adjusted.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >ⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ<  15:52, 12 December 2017 (UTC)

WP:NODEADLINE. There is no reason to rush an incomplete fix. But we can and should encourage the developers to fix the more general problem with the HTML that is being emitted. — Carl (CBM · talk) 16:09, 12 December 2017 (UTC)

Oh, I agree, but it's unlikely to happen quickly if it all, and it's no excuse to use bad markup in the interim. I am happy to see some traction on the : Phabricator ticket for the first time in years but they keep saying, basically, "it's hard" which generally translates to "WONTFIX", either formally or through perpetual inaction.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >ⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ<  19:47, 12 December 2017 (UTC)

It appears extremely unlikely that the Phab ticket is over going to be acted upon. "It's too hard", basically.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >ⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ<  23:57, 20 December 2017 (UTC)

I think <math display="block"> is the way to go. It gets centered by default, but this was changed on common.css (see Misplaced Pages talk:WikiProject Mathematics/Archive/2015/Sep#Styling of block mode display of math formula). Helder 12:59, 26 December 2017 (UTC)

History of this page

I chased down the time when colons were adopted as the Misplaced Pages system for indenting displayed mathematical content. Although the WP:MOSMATH page appears to be created in 2005, the actual style for indented equations was documented as early as 2002 . The fact that guidance on indentation was included so soon illustrates how indenting displayed equations is fundamental to the presentation of mathematics - it is not a side topic for this page. The page history also shows that this page was not "forked" from any other MOS pages. Indeed, any other MOS page which describes formatting of mathematics is likely to have been written after this page, and could be viewed as a fork of this page. — Carl (CBM · talk) 16:28, 12 December 2017 (UTC)

No one said this page forked from another one. Rather, it's PoV-forking of guidelines, and against WP:CONLEVEL policy, to filibuster again this MoS subpage being updated to conform with current main-MoS and MOS:ACCESS advice that recommends more accessible markup over less accessible. It's "how to indent content better" provisions, and it has nothing to do with maths in particular. There's nothing special about a block of math content versus a block of poetic or linguistic or comics content. It's content, and there's a crap way to indent it that happens to be easy but with poor results, versus several well-tested and long-deployed better ways to do it that cost nothing but a few extra characters. If maths editors couldn't handle using a template instead of a colon, they couldn't handle <math> markup, or wikimarkup in general, in the first place.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >ⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ<  19:47, 12 December 2017 (UTC)

"No one said this page forked from another one. Rather, it's PoV-forking of guidelines," - which page is the fork, in that case? The MOS has always allowed the use of colons, and WP:INDENTGAP even says they are "commonly used". There is no general MOS page on "indenting all kinds of content"; to the extent that WP:INDENTGAP has advice on indentation, it is purely advisory, not in any way mandatory nor controlling. — Carl (CBM · talk) 22:38, 12 December 2017 (UTC)

Re: "which page is is the fork...?" – Repeat: No one said a page forked from another one; rather, it's PoV-forking of guidance content (of what a maths-topical MoS subpage says about an accessibility matter about which is it not authoritative, from what the main MoS page and the accessibility MoS page say about it). There absolutely is general MoS material on indenting all kinds of content – lots of it, all consistent except at MOS:MATH: "Various templates are available for indentation, including {{block indent}}, and (for inline use) {{in5}}. (at MOS:INDENT, a new shortcut created just for you :-), and see the lengthy quote below from MOS:INDENTGAP, they key material from which is "Colons (:) at the start of a line .... produces broken HTML .... The result is ... confusion for any visitor unused to Misplaced Pages's broken markup. This is not ideal for accessibility or semantics." And at MOS:DLIST: "When wikimarkup colons are used just for visual indentation, they too are rendered in HTML as description lists, but without ;-delimited terms to which the :-indented material applies. Use indentation templates in articles, e.g. {{in5}} or one of its variants for one line, and {{block indent}} for more than one line (even if misuse of description list markup on talk pages is too ingrained to change at this point)." (recently updated to refer to the same templates instead of different, older ones, but substantively unchanged). "t is purely advisory" – Um, everything in all guidelines is purely advisory, including this one you're so protective of/controlling over. Even policy material can be viewed as advisory, in light of WP:IAR and WP:COMMONSENSE, other than legal policies imposed on WP as hard requirements by WP:OFFICE. So, the "advisory" point you're making is not a real point. No one said anything at all about anything being "mandatory or controlling"; this has never been about anything other than MOS:MATHS recommending a practice deprecated in favor of more accessible practice specified by the main MoS page and the accessibility page and the list-markup page. The material in question has nothing at all to do with mathematics and <math>...</math> markup, only with good versus awful ways to shift content to the right. I think we've been over this at least 5 times now..  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >ⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ<  12:55, 13 December 2017 (UTC)

Until this edit (which was even reverted) WP:ACCESS said the following:

Colons (:) at the start of a line mark that line as part of an HTML definition list. The visual effect in most web browsers is to indent the line. This is used, for example, to indicate replies in a threaded discussion on Talk pages. This is not ideal for accessibility or semantics, but is currently in wide use. Blank lines should not be placed between indented lines of text, as they are interpreted by the software as marking the end of a list and the start of a new one. If a blank line is needed, place the same number of colons on it as those preceding the text below the blank line, for instance: : Text here. :: :: More text.

which is not in conflict with the MSM guideline. So pardon me if I disagree that an edit that is just a few days old has a higher CONLEVEL than a guideline that has existed since the early days of Misplaced Pages. As far as I am aware, the only place where this issue is being formally discussed (the pump) also does not reveal any consensus to change the existing guideline, contrary to the claim being advanced here that there is some larger consensus to change the established guideline for the indentation of mathematical equations. Sławomir Biały (talk) 22:43, 12 December 2017 (UTC)

To be fair, the new edit also only describes something as "a more accessible replacement" - there is no language saying that the replacement must be made, only that it is an option to consider. I do think that any change to the MOS which actually required (in order to conform with the MOS) that colons needed to be replaced with something else would require much more consensus than just an undiscussed edit. The edit is OK with me precisely because it only gives an option without adding any new requirements on editors. — Carl (CBM · talk) 22:58, 12 December 2017 (UTC)

Yes, but subsequent undiscussed edits have substantially changed the balance. Sławomir Biały (talk) 12:00, 13 December 2017 (UTC)

Nah. Same stuff was already at MOS:INDENT and MOS:DLIST.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >ⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ<  12:55, 13 December 2017 (UTC)

"Was already at" = Two hours ago? With a personal attack against a group of editors thrown in the edit summary for good measure. Seems pretty tendentious. In the closing of your RfC, it was mentioned that this behavior is not appropriate, and could result in sanctions. This change too was very recent, and especially the paragraph mandating the use of templates should be removed as in contradiction with longstanding guidelines per WP:CONLEVEL. Sławomir Biały (talk) 14:16, 13 December 2017 (UTC)

Not recently added, just updated to stop recommending an obsolete template in that particular case. I've reworded it less emphatically, though, if that will dissuade you and ... what, one? ... other math editor from rampaging against everyone who cares about accessibility. WP:STICK, at all 'at. You can rant for the next five years if you like, and it's not going to change the fact that abusing : by itself for visual indentation causes validation failure, problems for screen readers, WP:REUSE issues, and other headaches. Just give it a rest, man.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >ⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ<  17:58, 13 December 2017 (UTC)

I do not think it is appropriate to describe the actions of other editors with whom you disagree as "rampaging". I also object to the implicit subtext here, that when you make an edit to a guideline, you are simply upholding community consensus, but when others make an edit to a guideline, they are on a "rampage". That is completely unconstructive. "Give it a rest, man." I agree. I wish you would take your own advice. Sławomir Biały (talk) 22:15, 13 December 2017 (UTC)

Fair enough; I should not be hyperbolic.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >ⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ<  23:11, 13 December 2017 (UTC)

(edit conflict) Exactly, CBM. It is not really possible under policy for a guideline to "forbid" editors from doing anything. Under WP:EDITING policy, as long as you're doing something productive, within the core content policies, you just go right ahead. If the style or markup is crap; some WP:GNOME will clean it up later. No one's ever been banned or blocked for not following some MoS line-item, and it's not plausible anyone ever would be for something that's just recommended as less problematic. The issue here is that a handful editors want to effectively require the misuse of : markup for visual indentation and deny that MOS and MOS:ACCESS and MOS:DLIST have identified a more accessible way to get the same effect. That denialism's not okay; it's a PoV fork of the advice here against three other guidelines (which are actually relevant to indentation and list markup accessibility while MOS:MATHS is not). This is a WP:CONLEVEL failure (MOS's lead: "If any contradiction arises, this page has precedence over all detail pages of the guideline"). There is no defensible basis for the idea that it can be forbidden in MOS:MATHS to recommend and illustrate the less problematic markup, even if you and Sławomir Biały and whoever else prefer personally to use the more problematic : markup. That really is all there is to it. A couple of you have made a drama mountain out of a technical molehill that has been considered controversial by precisely zero other people on all of WP for years.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >ⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ<  12:55, 13 December 2017 (UTC)

I agree that CONLEVEL is important. This RfC closure establishes that the community consensus is to continue to allow colons for indentation of mathematics displays. Sławomir Biały (talk) 14:20, 13 December 2017 (UTC)

Nah. This blatant and falsely-worded canvassing establishes that the RfC was derailed by a bloc vote from one special interest group who did not understand the wording of the RfC. It's a WP:FALSECONSENSUS. But, it's a moot point. No one tried to "ban" using colons for indentation anyway! The RfC had literally nothing to do with that at all, only with whether two editors here can filibuster against MoS subpages agreeing with the main MoS page.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >ⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ<  17:58, 13 December 2017 (UTC)

Carl's summary of the issue seems reasonable to me. Sławomir Biały (talk) 22:11, 13 December 2017 (UTC)

Make that case, then. If you still think this is worth any more of our time.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >ⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ<  23:11, 13 December 2017 (UTC)

Please add explicit guidance re markup vs. special characters

Hello.

I propose/request that the MOS be amended to include explicit guidance regarding the use of markup versus special characters when editing mathematical formulas.

The MOS currently gives guidance for specific cases of similar situations. For example, it prefers <sup>2</sup> instead of ². It does not, however, address the possibility that an editor might directly enter the "special" character itself: ². This markup-versus-special issue is the subject I request be addressed.

By providing the "Special characters" toolbar, which directly inserts hard-to-type characters into the wikitext, Misplaced Pages seems to favor that approach over markup. I find this problematic.

The "toolbar" method requires the editor to search for and identify the desired character by eye alone. This effort is difficult.

• There is often no easily-recognizable strict total order on the set of symbol characters. It is not even clear within which category to search. (Is the "sigma" I want in category "Greek," "Greek extended," or "Symbols?")
• Even worse, can my sigma appear under multiple categories, suggesting that the correct choice of category depends on the character's semantic function? For example, if I wrote an article about a mathematician from Athens, would I need to use sigma from one toolbar category when specifying his name, and sigma from a distinct toolbar category when typesetting the formula he produced? Likewise, the toolbar offers "↑". Is that supposed to mean Knuth's up-arrow notation, or is it just a dingbat? Is there even a difference? Can this situation even happen?
• Even if the editor knows where to look, some characters are difficult to distinguish visually. Consider Ö and Ő and Ố.
• The above problems do not easily abate as the editor gains experience. Even if I know I want Knuth's notation, there is no way for me to quickly specify it.

The consequence of this difficulty is editor fatigue, and therefore editor carelessness. Editors who want beta will just use ß (Eszett) if they find it first. In the long term, I am concerned that "emojification" of Misplaced Pages's mathematics content will create ambiguity and decrease the value of articles. (See Emoji#Emoji_communications_problems.)

The alternative to the "toolbar" method is markup using one of the supported languages such as HTML or <math>. This eliminates the ambiguity problem (ala β), but has the disadvantage of a steep learning curve. I suppose that my preference for the direction of guidance is clear, but my aim in writing today is to gain clarity for myself and other editors, not to promote my particular opinion.

To summarize, I request that the MOS

1. clarify whether or not (English) Misplaced Pages has a preference regarding markup versus special characters, and if so, specify what that preference is.
2. clarify whether editors should or should not observe a semantic difference between symbols/characters used in formulas and used elsewhere.
3. advise that this guidance concerns an advanced editing technicality, and that inexperienced editors should not allow it to dissuade their participation. (A WikiGnome will come along to fix any mistakes.)

Thank you,

Christopher Ursich (talk) 00:31, 19 February 2018 (UTC)

Um, Christopher, you don't have to use bold on every link. In fact, please don't make links bold unless there's some particular reason to emphasize them. - dcljr (talk) 04:11, 20 February 2018 (UTC)

The preference for explicit superscripts over the superscript-2 character has nothing to do with how it is marked up. It is because the character doesn't match other superscripts; e.g. ''x''⁵''y''² comes out as xy² which (at least in my view) has the 2 tiny and squished into its variable compared to the 5. So you should not use this character regardless of whether you type it directly or use the html entity. For the same reason, for characters that are ok to use directly, it should not matter whether you type them or name them. I think we should not express a preference for one way or the other, and in fact more strongly I think we should discourage editors from changing one way to the other or vice versa, because it is a useless waste of time for them to do so and a useless waste of time for the rest of us to see those changes on our watchlist. Better to encourage those editors to do something else, like creating actual content. —David Eppstein (talk) 06:09, 20 February 2018 (UTC)

Logarithms?

A discussion on this topic from 2010 is in the archive, but no conclusion seems to have been reached, there's nothing in the article, and I'd think there ought to be a consistent guideline here. I would propose ${\displaystyle \ln }$, ${\displaystyle \log _{10}}$, and ${\displaystyle \log _{2}}$ always be used for their respective meanings, with the bare ${\displaystyle \log }$ being reserved for contexts such as asymptotic behavior. Mathematicians might object to the foremost, but this being Misplaced Pages, I'd imagine even quite advanced topics would be found by a fair share of readers likely to read "log" and infer "common log"; similarly, although I'd imagine most of those with the sort of background to assume the natural log would catch on from context in most circumstances, the lay usage of the bare symbol to mean the common log should probably also be avoided for the confusion it might cause, as should the niche ${\displaystyle \lg }$. Regardless, even if all of that is rebuked, I do strongly believe we need some community-wide standard. Thoughts? 50.252.247.245 (talk) 19:37, 30 May 2018 (UTC)

That is not the standard usage in pure mathematics, where "log" without adornment is much more common as the notation for the natural log. —David Eppstein (talk) 20:09, 30 May 2018 (UTC)

I'm aware of this. However, as I said, this seems likely to confuse anyone not a reader of pure math journals, likely to be the majority of readers even on extremely advanced topics. Even those familiar with mathematicians' convention might not expect it on Misplaced Pages. 50.252.247.245 (talk) 20:32, 30 May 2018 (UTC)

On first glance it seems like a reasonable request. But it's a problem for Misplaced Pages, where we need to stick to the sources, and the sources all use "log". Hmm. Mgnbar (talk) 20:53, 30 May 2018 (UTC)

The convention in lower-level mathematics (in the U.S., anyway) seems to be that ${\displaystyle \log }$ means ${\displaystyle \log _{10}}$ (that's what I learned), while the convention in higher-level mathematics and engineering seems to be that ${\displaystyle \log }$ means ${\displaystyle \log _{e}=\ln }$. I don't recall any specific case where ${\displaystyle \log }$ meant ${\displaystyle \log _{2}}$, but I would not be at all surprised to have such cases pointed out to me. Given the inherent ambiguity, I agree that bare ${\displaystyle \log }$ should be discouraged in articles, except (as pointed out by the OP) in cases where it doesn't matter which base is used. In all other cases, ${\displaystyle \log }$ should never be used without clarification as to which base is intended. As for sticking to the sources, we need not use the exact notation used in sources as long as the notation we use has the equivalent meaning. - dcljr (talk) 21:05, 30 May 2018 (UTC)

There are definitely textbooks in computer science, information theory, and engineering that use the log = log₂ convention. See footnotes 17–19 of binary logarithm. I would be surprised to see this variation in pure mathematics, though, and I wouldn't recommend it even for computer science articles in Misplaced Pages (except within O-notation, where the base of the log is largely irrelevant). —David Eppstein (talk) 21:19, 30 May 2018 (UTC)

It's more important from our perspective to maintain consistency with sources rather than between articles. In some articles it will be more natural to write ${\displaystyle \log }$ or ${\displaystyle \log _{10}}$ or ${\displaystyle \log _{2}}$ or ${\displaystyle \ln }$. To impose order on this would be for Misplaced Pages to decide that certain matters of notation are better than others. That is incompatible with our objectives. So we simply stick with what prevailing sources use in a given context, and if there are no dominant conventions, we follow MOS:RETAIN. Sławomir Biały (talk) 21:45, 30 May 2018 (UTC)

"Sticking with sources" should not come at the expense of readers' understanding. This is an encyclopedia, not a professional journal. We should make it clear in each article which base logarithm is meant, and not rely on unspecified "conventions", whether they are shared by our sources or not. Surely we can all agree that (when it matters) simply using ${\displaystyle \log }$ in an article without providing any additional context (as to what the base may be) should be discouraged. No? - dcljr (talk) 00:51, 31 May 2018 (UTC)

I would again say it depends on the article. In an article like calculus or exponent, absolutely. In an article like Poisson kernel, nor so much, as one would never see any other kind of logarithm in that context. Again, we can let the treatment of standard sources in the subject inform our stylistic preferences for a given article. Sławomir Biały (talk) 00:59, 31 May 2018 (UTC)

There are also contexts for which "log" is the only correct notation for a concept that generalizes the natural log to other domains; see e.g. closed subgroup theorem or logarithm of a matrix. It would be incorrect to substitute "ln" or to put a subscript on the log in those contexts. —David Eppstein (talk) 01:37, 31 May 2018 (UTC)

What I believe we should do is to mention clearly which logarithm is used the first time an unclear ${\displaystyle \log }$ is used in any article; we should not change the notation if that would be weird in the context. If an explicit ${\displaystyle \ln }$, ${\displaystyle \log _{2}}$, ${\displaystyle \log _{10}}$ etc. is used, though, there is no need to explain. While some might find it strange to mention the log used as it would be obvious to them, we have to remember this is an encyclopedia and that we are writing to laymen (although in some cases we do expect some education). --Jhertel (talk) 10:33, 31 May 2018 (UTC)

Obviously if something is unclear to readers, it should be pointed out, whether that is a logarithm, units, and other conventions. Conversely, if something is likely to be clear to readers, then it is not necessary to point it out. The MoS doesn't usually take a position on whether extremely specific conventions like those for logarithms must be pointed out in the text. Sławomir Biały (talk) 11:44, 31 May 2018 (UTC)

I would agree it depends on the context. I would apply the rule that whatever we can assume six months before a person would be properly prepared to read an article need not be gone over again in the article. Anything which would be dealt with in a mathematics degree need not assume log is anything but a natural logarithm. Anyway the days when people remembered from their 7 figure tables that log₁₀3 was 0.4771213 are long gone, one just uses a calculator to multiply. Dmcq (talk) 11:57, 31 May 2018 (UTC)

Don't we already clarify a lot? Are there specific examples where the logarithm is not already clarified? Mgnbar (talk) 12:25, 31 May 2018 (UTC)

Indenting, again

From § Indenting (permalink) as well as various other MOS pages, it seems like using colons solely for indentation within articles is Bad, and using LaTeX’s block display mode $${\displaystyle x=3}$$ does exactly what we want. Is there a reason the article doesn’t advise that over misusing colons? —67.14.236.193 (talk) 05:12, 28 June 2018 (UTC)

I think the main reason is that the |display=block syntax is still pretty new. But also, it doesn't work properly for text that is already indented (for instance in bulleted lists, and yes, I have seen bulleted lists with displayed equations in them). And if your goal is semantic cleanliness, it's just as broken as indenting with colons; for instance, your comment above nests a div (actually two nested divs) inside a p, something that is forbidden in proper html. Finally, the idea of avoiding colons for indentation is based on what is arguably a bug in Wikimedia rather than an actual semantic problem; colons are widely used with the intended meaning of indenting something, so the semantics of the wiki-markup is clean enough. The actual problem is that the Wikimedia engine renders the "indent something" semantics as a piece of a definition list even when there is no surrounding definition list to be found. So avoiding : is just working around a bug rather than making your intent clearer. —David Eppstein (talk) 05:25, 28 June 2018 (UTC)

WP uses HTML5; the paragraph element automatically ends whenever another paragraph or div or similar is encountered. (Edit: it doesn’t start a new <p> after the math, so the text underneath isn’t even in a paragraph, so there is that bug.) And colons (and semicolons) still function exactly as originally intended, and wikimarkup still lacks a simple indent. That’s not a bug in the colon; that’s us misusing definition/description/glossary lists purely for aesthetics. —67.14.236.193 (talk) 06:11, 28 June 2018 (UTC)

Yes. The convenience-over-standards-compliance hissy fit that was thrown the last time we raised the issue of abuse of description-list markup (:) was, frankly, shameful and an embarrassment to the project.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  06:21, 28 June 2018 (UTC)