Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Wikipedia style and naming

The following discussions are requested to have community-wide attention:

Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style

In many articles about living persons, and particularly about persons in positions of authority, e.g. member of parliament, corporation CEO, city councilor, etc, the lead paragraph often uses the verb "to serve" in denoting the person's work." E.g. "Ms Smith serves/has been serving/has served as member of the XYZ Board of Directors." In this related discussion, the issue was raised about the potential for meaningless excess in that term's use. (Here's a useful essay on that.) This, of course, applies to biographies about persons no longer living.

Comments are invited on the following options:

• A Use any simple form of "to be," e.g. "Smith is Acme Ltd auditor."
• B Continue to use "serve" in biographies, e.g. "Smith serves as Acme Ltd auditor."

-The Gnome (talk) 17:37, 12 August 2024 (UTC)

Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Actors and Filmmakers

Hi,

According to MOS:FILMCAST, common nouns within roles should not be capitalised to distinguish between character names and job descriptions. Currently, the use of sentence case introduces ambiguity for readers; for instance, it does not clarify whether 'Joker' refers to a character name or if 'Joker' describes his job when no character name is provided. I encourage you to refer to my related discussion with the user's talk. Therefore, I recommend adopting lowercase for common nouns in the Role field to ensure alignment with MOS:FILMCAST. Anoop Bhatia (talk) 01:51, 1 August 2024 (UTC)

Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Dates and numbers

What units should be used for distances between star systems and galaxies? These are measured in light years (ly) in popular news and educational media; professional astronomers use parsecs (pc). Articles currently use a variety of units (some only ly and some ly converted to km) but most commonly use ly converted to pc in infoboxes (often automatically from technical data). If conversion to SI units (like kilometers) is not required in certain contexts, this would be added as an explicit exception to MOS:CONVERSIONS. The maximum distance in the observable universe is under 100 billion light-years, and interplanetary distances (inside a star system) are a fraction of a light-year and are measured in astronomical units (AU or au). 01:40, 28 July 2024 (UTC)

Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Biography

There are two questions:

1. Should guidance be added to the Manual of Style regarding the position of "retired" and "former" in the first sentence of biographical articles?
2. If guidance is to be added, which form should be recommended?
   A. X is an American retired actor.
   B. X is a retired American actor.

Khiikiat (talk) 10:49, 23 July 2024 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Naming of German municipal subdivisions

While browsing through articles on subdivisions of Cologne with the intention of adding translations from German Wikipedia, I noticed that the terms used to translate different levels of subdivision are inconsistent across these pages. The overview article Districts of Cologne translates Stadtbezirk as "(city) district", and Stadtteil very literally as "city part". Articles about individual Stadtbezirke on the other hand, like Lindenthal and Rodenkirchen instead render Stadtbezirk as "borough" and Stadtteil as either "(city) quarter" "city part".

By way of comparison, articles on Berlin, which calls its top-level subdivisions Bezirk and its second-level subdivisions Ortsteil (which meanings do not differ substantially from Stadtbezirk and Stadtteil), uses "borough" for the former and "locality" for the latter.

This is confusing in several different ways:

• Readers may take a minute to work out that what some articles call a "borough" is the same thing other articles call a "district".
• The literal translation "city part" for Stadtteil sounds vague and doesn't really convey any scale or significance to the reader. It also sounds a bit "awkward" to my mind. The term "locality" used for Ortsteil is less awkward, but no less vague.
• The use of "quarter" for Stadtteil is wholly nonsensical as the Stadtteile themselves can be further subdivided informally into German: (Stadt)viertel / Kölsch: Veedel, which literally translates as..."(city) quarter". Berlin articles use "neighbourhood" for such further, informal subdivisions of their Ortsteile.

I would like to propose the following consistent approach for the subdivisions of German cities:

• (Stadt)bezirk or other top-level division to be rendered as borough
• Stadt-/Ortsteil or other second-level division to be rendered as district
• Viertel or other (usually informal) third-level division to be rendered as neighbourhood except in proper nouns^note (e.g. Severinsviertel → "Severin Quarter", Belgisches Viertel → "Belgian Quarter")

Subjectively, as a binative of English and German, this is what seems most intuitively comprehensible/evocative, but there are also objective reasons speaking for it:

1. The City of Cologne's official web page on its subdivisions alongside this official map of Veedel uses precisely this borough-district-neighbourhood schema while retaining "quarter" for proper nouns (example)
2. Berlin likewise officially uses "boroughs" for Bezirke and "districts and neighbourhoods" for Ortsteile and their subdivisions
3. The borough-district schema has also been used for translating Stockholm's top-level stadsdelsområden and second-level stadsdelar, the latter even being cognate with Stadtteile.

However, I didn't want to charge ahead and make these changes without first inviting comment to see if there might be any good reasons this isn't already what's used across the board. So...what do other editors think? --Newbiepedian (talk · C · X! · L) 12:13, 18 July 2024 (UTC)