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Copy edit

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@Mvcg66b3r: I've noticed that you've made a lot of reverts to copy edits of this article. I'm going ahead and providing the reasons for my edits here:

  • Infobox
    • The infobox was large and crowded with information, extending past the lead and TOC and well into the first section of the article. MOS:INFOBOXPURPOSE notes that the purpose of an infobox: to summarize key facts that appear in the article [...] The less information it contains, the more effectively it serves that purpose, allowing readers to identify key facts at a glance. I trimmed a lot of extraneous information, particularly information that did not fit an infobox parameter or which was unsourced.
    • I stripped bold per MOS:BOLD
    • I stripped specialized styling on the expanded call sign per MOS:ACRO
    • I removed tiny font sizes in infoboxes, due to accessibility issues. (A recent RfC decided that since infoboxes already use small text, that further reducing text size was not to be recommended.)
    • All of the above style issues are really just attempts to cram more information into the infobox, which is counter to MOS:INFOBOXPURPOSE.
    • Replaced html line breaks with templates, as the former has been known to cause problems with some mobile platforms.
  • Other MOS fixes: MOS:GEOCOMMA, MOS:BOLD
  • Various grammar fixes
  • Lists should be bulleted rather than numbered when they do not have an inherent order (MOS:LISTBULLET)
  • Removed excessively detailed unsourced trivia. Articles should be a summary of notable information about the subject.

Please feel free to {{ping|Reidgreg}} if you have any questions. – Reidgreg (talk) 20:39, 27 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Please note that the copy edit was reverted in this edit on 6 December, along with similar reverts to copy edits of WKON, WKOH, WKMU, WKMJ-TV, WKSO-TV, WKGB-TV and WKHA. – Reidgreg (talk) 15:34, 11 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Reidgreg, I was only doing the infoboxes to maintain consistency with other TV station articles. Mvcg66b3r (talk) 17:47, 8 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]
@Mvcg66b3r: I can understand that, but it's a bit of an WP:OTHERSTUFFEXISTS argument. Other articles or editors doing that describes a practise, but it doesn't mean that practise has consensus on the level of a guideline or policy. Also, I think there's an argument for consistency across all Wikipedia articles, not just topic-specific articles. The Manual of Style represents a fairly broad consensus of editors, and while it can be set aside for a good reason there really ought to be a specific reason to explain why deviating is beneficial. – Reidgreg (talk) 18:18, 8 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]
@Mvcg66b3r: Do you have anything else to add for why you think the article is better without the edits that I made? I'm going to go over a few more things (some of which was previously mentioned on my talk page).
  • I felt that a lot of the information in the infobox was unsourced and marked some for needing citations and removed others as unsourced trivia. The two tiny external link icons under "Public license information" are unlabelled and non-obvious, and aren't a standard reference style. If they are being used as references, it's unclear what information in the infobox is being cited to them. A good deal of the information in the infobox can not be found at either external link or contradicts with the infobox:
    • at publicfiles.fcc.gov the studio is listed as Atlanta, not Chatsworth.
    • the call letter meaning, branding, station slogan, former affiliations, former callsigns, and other channels/translators do not appear to be listed at either site.
  • I moved the first mention of the unsourced former callsign WCLP-TV up to the lead sentence as an (alternative) historical name for the subject. This is important as WCLP-TV redirects to the article (WP:R#ASTONISH).
  • I added[citation needed] tags at unsourced passages, to help editors spot where citations or additional citations were needed. Per Wikipedia's verifiability policy, challenged material should either be cited or removed (WP:CHALLENGE). I feel that removing the inline tags without discussion is not an acceptable practice.
  • I linked terms on first mention in lead and body (MOS:REPEATLINK).
  • Some tone issues, replacing informal language:
    • can no longer get GPB's flagship station → can no longer receive GPB's flagship station
  • Conciseness; summarizing material in fewer words makes text easier to read:
    • In effect, it was also Chattanooga's first educational television station, as WTCI-TV had not started broadcasting until 1970. → It was Chattanooga's first educational television station, joined by WTCI-TV in 1970.
    • In early 1979, the station added the -TV suffix to its call sign, becoming WCLP-TV on February 2. → On February 2, 1979, the station branded itself as WCLP-TV.
  • The unsourced passage about translator W12DK-D had some confusion about the timing of what it describes. I had tagged it for clarification regarding this and changed some verb tenses and which will also → is anticipated to be. We can't state future events in Wikipedia's voice WP:CRYSTAL but with it being unsourced and no idea of who anticipated it or when this was supposed to have happened leaves it rather problematic.
  • I removed some information about W04BJ, W27AA, W65AD, etc., as non-notable trivia. I didn't think their equipment failures or channels that they never broadcast on were important enough to the subject of the article, especially as it was all unsourced.
  • Removed unnecessary quotes around the parenthetic ("parent").
  • Removed under federal mandate (which was later pushed back to June 12, 2009) which was irrelevant to the subject since the station had completed the switchover on the original target date.
  • Filled-out a citation template for an external link in section Digital television
  • Ran IAbot to clean up citations and check archival of sources for dead links.
Please let me know any additional reasons you have for reverting the changes like those described above. If you agree that some of the changes were improvements, perhaps those parts of the edits can be reinstated in the article(s). For the rest, if we remain undecided, I feel the best option might be to call a Request for Comment since this involves multiple articles and general editing practices. In such case, I hope you'll help me with the wording of an RfC to concisely cover our concerns. Thanks. – Reidgreg (talk) 15:34, 11 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]

About the Third Opinion Request: The request made at Third Opinion has been removed (i.e. declined). Like all other moderated content dispute resolution venues at Wikipedia, Third Opinion requires thorough talk page discussion before seeking assistance. If an editor will not discuss, consider the recommendations which are made here. — TransporterMan (TALK) 22:43, 18 December 2019 (UTC) (Not watching this page)[reply]

RfC about TV and radio station style variances

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RESOLVED
While there is some variation for use of bold per WP:R#ASTONISH, no reasons were offered for varying from Manual of Style (MOS) guidelines for TV and radio stations articles. The implication is that there is no barrier toward harmonizing such articles with MOS guidelines. – Reidgreg (talk) 17:38, 26 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Is there a good reason for television and radio station articles to vary from Manual of Style guidelines? – Reidgreg (talk) 16:24, 27 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Further information:

There has been a practice in some television and radio station articles of varying from the style guidelines, such as applying special styling to expanded call signs (e.g.: WNGH: W North Georgia Highlands), bolding previous callsigns and broadcast translator names throughout the article (not merely in the lead for alternate names and redirects), filling many fields of the infobox in considerable detail with information not found elsewhere in the article, and using small fonts in infoboxes to facilitate inclusion of more information. MOS:ACRO, MOS:BOLD, MOS:INFOBOXPURPOSE and MOS:SMALLFONT discourage these practices.

Additionally, are the small external links in the bottom of {{infobox broadcast}} (under "Public license information") an acceptable reference for information found elsewhere in the infobox?

There was a brief July 2018 discussion related to this at WikiProject Radio Stations, with opinion divided between style editors and WP:Radio editors. More recently, this involves the copy edits and reverts of such to eight TV station articles (WKON, WKOH, WKMU, WKGB-TV, WKHA, WKSO-TV, WKMJ-TV and WNGH-TV). The edits to WNGH-TV were discussed above, and are indicative of the group.

It is hoped that this RfC will determine if there are reasons for these practices, and if they might form a consensus of opinion.

Thank you for your time and opinions on this. – Reidgreg (talk) 16:24, 27 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]

  • No: For me, I have always used bold on the initial use of the station's callsign at the very beginning of the lede and if there is a current callsign meaning (using Reidgreg's example, W North Georgia Highlands) in the infobox. Anything else, I think is an unnecessary use of bold. That said, I will use bold in the infobox for the "HD1", "HD2", etc. (example WPTE) to give some differentiation between that and the branding. Though, that's not a sticking point with me, I just think it makes the text look a little easier on the eyes in my opinion. Otherwise, I think any extra bold within the article is unnecessary. - Neutralhomer • Talk • 19:23 on December 27, 2019 (UTC)
    @Neutralhomer: I can understand using bold to create subheadings in an infobox. However, the example infobox you note looks crowded and some of the information doesn't appear in any of the article's sources. If the infobox should only contain "key information", then shouldn't a lot of that be trimmed and/or worked into the article body? Perhaps, per Raymie below, we should look at just what ought to be in the infobox. – Reidgreg (talk) 17:49, 29 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • No particularly use of small text in articles is not helpful to the hard of seeing. Let standard styles operate on the text, and then if people want to see variants, they can modify that themselves. I would like to see the MOS cover how to indicate where an abbreviation comes from. The use of bold, underline, italic or big are possibilities, but it should be standard across all pages. Though for former call signs, I think it is fair enough for them to be bolded. If people are complaining that is not in the lead, perhaps the MOS needs to be modified to allow this. Redirects to sections also do well to have the redirect text bolded, and that will not be in the lead. For former radio station call signs, these could be in the lead. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 21:41, 27 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]
    @Graeme Bartlett and Neutralhomer: At MOS:ACRO under Emphasis, there is a specific recommendation against use of bold, underline, italic, or other special styles to emphasize the letters of an expanded acronym. In part, this RfC is to determine if there is a good reason to set aside the MOS for call signs. – Reidgreg (talk) 17:49, 29 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • No. The Manual of Style exists for a good reason. Allowing any topic area to intentionally vary from the MOS only invites more such changes. (History articles might begin to vary in one way, biographies might begin to vary in another way, etc.) Let's do our best to stick to the standards and try to maintain consistency across subject areas. Eddie Blick (talk) 01:05, 28 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • No. I say this as someone who earlier this year led a somewhat confused series of RfCs and requested moves to bring radio and TV in line with MOS on disambiguators in articles. Here are my thoughts in general on the discussion:
    • I completely understand the text size accessibility and data parsing motives in re: the infobox. I think a good question would be "what would these infoboxes look like" and "what information shouldn't be there" for both TV and radio? That might help me visualize what's going on.
    • Placing former call letters in the lede as bolded items is not practical. Some stations, particularly in radio, have changed their call letters a lot (a random example is KFCO)—that's probably one of the reasons we've bolded them for so long in article copy, to help readers follow along. (Five or six changes is not an unusual number.) Out of the universe of topics on this encyclopedia, it's not terribly common that one article subject goes by so many names in such a short period of time, but in radio, especially in the United States, it's more frequent. In some cases, information in the infobox (callsign history and airdate) is all we have on stub articles about a radio station's history, and for a typical US radio station that is broadcasting now and has been on the air since at least the early 1980s, all that is needed are two citations (to pre-1980 FCC history cards and post-1980 FCC database results).
      @Raymie: For the KFCO example, why is it impractical to have the former call letters in the lead? Most of the article is about the station's history, so the lead could summarize that with a paragraph which includes the former call signs in bold, then remove that bold style from the body. – Reidgreg (talk) 17:49, 29 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]
      @Reidgreg: Only if the lede were an adequate summary of the article, and typically that's not done. Turns out that article is missing the history card-era callsign history, too, so it's actually longer! I don't want to see an article start KFCO, formerly known as KCNQ, KSDD, KSIR, KSIR-FM, KSYY-FM, KONN-FM, KDHT-FM and KXDE, ... Raymie (t • c) 19:12, 29 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]
      @Raymie: To avoid clutter, I tend to only list very common alternate names in the lead sentence (MOS:LEADSENTENCE), and would tend to summarize the history and former names in a second paragraph of the lead. – Reidgreg (talk) 16:47, 30 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]
      @Reidgreg and Raymie: A good example of an article that would include mention of a former callsign is when people either strongly associate the station with that callsign, or if there was a major cultural event that the station was involved in. For the former, WERE mentions its past identity as WJMO (not to be confused with the current WJMO) due to its long run as an R&B outlet and threatened license revocation. For the latter, WKNR mentions its original identity as WJW (AM), which employed Alan Freed and sponsored the Moondog Coronation Ball, a landmark in popular music. In both cases, neither article has the previous calls bolded in the second paragraph. Nathan Obral (talk) 23:57, 1 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
    • Generally, the public license links in TV infoboxes are something unique to TV as that was never implemented in {{Infobox radio station}}. For the public file, that really should be a new and separate template in the external links area, in the vein of {{FMQ}} or whatever. (A minor revision to {{FCC-TV-Station-profile}} would allow it to be extensible to radio and applicable for all stations except LPFMs, which do not have FCC-required online public files.)
    • I learned about MOS:SMALLFONT today and noticed that {{Infobox radio station}} breaks it with its use of small text for the licensee field; a TPER has been made to remove that.
I generally support most of the MOS harmonization moves; I just want to see what that would look like in practice for a typical radio or TV station article to provide some feedback. Raymie (t • c) 03:20, 28 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]
@Raymie: {{HD Radio}} also uses MOS:SMALLFONT for what it's worth. In my opinion, {{HD Radio}} should just be (HD Radio) in the infobox, and the article lede should make an attempt to state the various methods of broadcasting, depending on how they exist. WMMS's article lede includes the following: Besides a standard analog transmission, WMMS broadcasts over two HD Radio channels, and is available online via iHeartRadio. The WMMS-HD2 digital subchannel, which airs an alternative rock format, also simulcasts over a low-power FM translator. (the overall verbiage being up to each editor's discretion) Nathan Obral (talk) 16:30, 2 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
@Nathan Obral: Nice catch. Looks like someone attempted to bring it into line in 2016 but was overruled by Levdr1lp. I am going to propose the change for that template as well. Raymie (t • c) 18:07, 2 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • No. And I'm saying this being as guilty as everyone else with bolding stuff. A good example of how over-bolding detracts from reading the article is WWDJ, which I recently reverted back into prose form so it actually read like an article again; a series of prior edits wound up making it look like a stub article. That station changed call letters ten times between 1977 and 2008, and in most cases, there isn't much to go on for most of those formats, just that the calls changed, and a cursory description of the format. (@Raymie: I haven't unbolded the body on that yet just so everyone can see how bad it can get.) The way I write ledes is pretty straightforward, bolding branding like 96.5 Kiss FM or SportsRadio 93.7 WEEI-FM might work in the lede, but even then that's up for an honest debate. @Vjmlhds and Levdr1lp: pinging you both given the extensive work the two of you have done on the Ohio radio/television articles (my lede writing for radio articles is heavily based off of how they write them). Nathan Obral (talk) 23:49, 1 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
I'm with Nathan here - bold in the lede, fine...in the meat of the article, not so much. So count me as a no. Vjmlhds (talk) 03:38, 2 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • No, for all the reasons above. See also WP:SSF for a summary of additional reasons why. The short version is that everyone in every field wants to do something "special" with something or other in their field, and if we permitted this for every field, then every imaginable variance would be in play all at once, and we'd have people spending all their WP time arguing over which version of a conflicting set of variances (mathematics journal style versus chemistry journal style, or whatever) should be applied to any particular instance. And it would suck beyond all belief. That kind of bullshit is why we have the Manual of Style in the first place, because fights to the virtual death over stylistic trivia were miring the early Wikipedia in pointless battlegrounding and were harming both editor collegiality and our ability to present a consistently-written encyclopedia for our readers. Even to this day MoS (and related WP:AT "issues") are still subject to discretionary sanctions because emotions run inappropriately high over style pet peeves that various editors have a subjectively WP:GREATWRONGS reaction about.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  01:03, 2 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • No I'm generally supportive of Raymie's reasonings for boldings or not and of ACCESS, but I've seen some editors go rogue with interpretations of that (such as needless bolding of owned-and-operated stations that otherwise goes unexplained outside of some post buried in a talk page I've never seen where an editor who was here for a month and never again agrees with whoever proposed it and it's called 'consensus' somehow). I also disagree with Obral on bolding of brandings as I prefer italics, but that's a per-editor interpretation, and want the HD Radio template to also be harmonized, along with some standards for translator information and such. I also don't want to see "WXXX, formerly known as WYYY, WYZZ" and such writing just overwhelming the lede. Nate • (chatter) 22:51, 7 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • @Mrschimpf: I also totally agree about the translator and repeater portions in the infobox. Here's my hot takes (and bringing in Raymie and Reidgreg):
  • Alex jirgens was on the right track with this particular edit that simplified both in this WJMO infobox, but even then, the (via HD Radio) was redundant for "WZAK-HD3" (see above comments re: {{HD Radio}} for why). I stripped that part out with WERE's infobox and simplified it a bit more, but the slash in between the calls and COL don't look quite right the more I see it.
  • Is "MHz" even necessary when referencing a translator? Isn't "98.9 W225CW (Lorain)" sufficient? Are parenthesizes even necessary for the translator's COL? (You do have to mention the COL when referencing the translator, as more often than not, it deviated from the programming source's COL.)
  • Is the {{nowrap}} template necessary for these two categories? I've been vacillating back and forth on that. It's been used when trying to get a line of text to fix but in some cases, it risks breaking the infobox (see KPCC). It's clearly done within the editor's discretion, of course, but clear limits need to be established.
In any event, these really need to be addressed. Let's set a standard that fits the MOS and follow it. Nathan Obral (talk) 22:34, 16 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • Yes for former call signs. I consider this consistent with MOS:BOLD, as "This is also done at the first occurrence of a term (commonly a synonym in the lead) that redirects to the article or one of its subsections, whether the term appears in the lead or not." ViperSnake151  Talk  17:48, 17 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
    This may be a 'No' vote because it is in line with MOS:BOLD and WP:R#ASTONISH rather than advocating an MOS variance. I'd note that WP:R#ASTONISH says bolding of redirect terms is optional: It will often be appropriate to bold the redirected term and insignificant or minor redirects can skip being emboldened. I feel that in practice, a notable former call sign would be mentioned in the lead of the article and emboldened there rather than in the body. Otherwise, if it's insignificant, minor or non-notable (i.e.: a translator or repeater transmitter), it might not be worth emboldening such a term when there would be little or no discussion of it. – Reidgreg (talk) 15:32, 21 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • I don't use bolds except to add subheadings as "bold:" (generally follow the table format with lack of space using : as the spacer) as TV stations now have more (sub)channels but the structure assumes one channel unless there is a translator (field labeled "other ch", which would miss mark a station casting a cable channel). Spshu (talk) 21:31, 22 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
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