Forum:Italicization on the wiki, revisited

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Hello, community!

It was just recently that I left my phase of inactivity and started editing again, now on Nukapedia as well. As things usually happen, I stumbled about an inconsistency in styling while taking care of a completely different thing: the wiki italicizes "titles of works", such as the name of every game (and add-on) in the Fallout series. This, however, was only rarely done with the article titles themselves: only articles about the games and add-ons display their title in italics; if the page name is a mix of a title and another topic, there was only little more than a handful of pages doing so.

I pointed this out on our Discord server. There was almost no feedback to my idea of making article titles consistently using italics for game titles, only editing queen Kate supported it. I made a personal project out of it, "Game-title italicism," and informed our Master about the many, many edits I would like to make – J didn't object.

Now, after the articles for several parts of the series already have been altered (you can see my progress in the aforementioned "project" link – couple hundred edits, so far), there was objection on our Discord, mostly concerning the looks of it. If I remember and have counted correctly, opinions result in a 3:3 – three people, including my person, supporting the idea, three people being against it. Before I go on making those edits, I would like to discuss this here officially.

Notes and references

• Not only our editing guideline suggests to do so, it is common on most wikis, including Wikipedia, and counts as "proper English."
• Apparently, this was discussed before, resulting in a blog by a writer and (now inactive) admin of this wiki, Italicization on the wiki - when to and when not to. "Article Titles" have their specific paragraph in this blog, saying "any italicized term also present in an article title should be italicized there as well."
• You have to be aware that this not only affects game title 'prefixes' on articles, such as Fallout 4 weapons, but also game title disambiguation suffixes, e.g. Meat bag (Fallout 4) (how it actually should look like).
• Also, using the {{DISPLAYTITLE}} code to make titles look like this does not work for categories, so they will still be displayed as e.g. Fallout 4 weapons.
• An alternative would be to use the Fallout font as it is displayed on the games' box art, which already is in italics. That requires some CSS work (and perhaps permission, especially for that "o"), but is possible. Unfortunately, as far as I know, this can't be implemented for infoboxes, though.

Examples

Fallout 4	vs.	Fallout 4
Fallout 4 weapons	vs.	Fallout 4 weapons
Meat bag (Fallout 4)	vs.	Meat bag (Fallout 4)

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So, what do you think, community? Consistently italics for game titles within article titles, or consistently not? Because, consistency is an important point in wikiing. (I will put a link to this on Discord, as well.) -- -- You talkin' to me? -- cCContributions -- 14:25, 6 December 2020 (UTC)

Discussion

I like the way it looks and continue to support your project. I am willing to help with the edits, too, if you would like my assistance. Also ... meat bag represent!

-kdarrow ^{take her for a spin!} 15:16, 6 December 2020 (UTC)

We apply standard capitalization rules to article titles, so it makes sense to apply italics. Though, personally, I would just as well change that as. Proper or not, I've always felt lower case can look off in the heading. In Editorial, one of the main arguments against italics being used is that titles are a form of bold, and that the created double emphasis represented some sort of typeface faux pas as well as causing some chaffing with the guidelines; however, we already have this styling on full display. For instance the pages for any game, like Fallout: New Vegas, or any add on, like Steel Dawn will have bold, italicized word(s) as the very first bit of content on the page. Honestly, the visuals do not bother me in the slightest, but it's also not something that gets my rocks off either. For me, it's just a matter of uniformity, where we either do treat titles as being subject to writing standards or we do not. But it would be weird to say one standard, such as our caps policy, needs to be in place, but italics are thrown out of the window for essentially no reason other than personal preference. Maybe there was some sort of standard showcased yesterday after I stopped following the conversation, but there was never a reason given, like such and such English manual being against the practice, to support the lack of italics. The Dyre Wolf (talk) 15:19, 6 December 2020 (UTC)

I'm hesitantly ok with changing books and overview pages' names to italics, but not for suffixes. Then the italics font would become much too intrusive on our wiki. These suffixes don't have the importance from the overview pages, just a tool to separate them from equal named articles from a different game version. Jspoelstra (talk) 15:47, 6 December 2020 (UTC)

My opinion is in favor of the italicizearion. As long as we keep it consistent, I can help get the italics out in. My reason for this is that italicizing this is actually preferred by proper English. User:FalloutofStarWars2077.16:38, 6 December 2020 (UTC)

Consistency only works if you can be consistent across all platforms and pages. As you stated above this doesn't work on category pages and it ALSO doesn't work on mobile meaning that this wouldn't be consistent no matter what. It also doesn't really look that great with the font we use for all the pages and making a massive site wide change just to try to force a new font isn't generally that good of an idea unless there is a planned redesign as everything is currently structured with the current font in mind. As for italics being preferred by proper english they are not preferred when combined with a bolded font style which is what is used here with the headers. -Eckserah ^{Head Dataminer} 18:33, 6 December 2020 (UTC)

It is possible to make the css only give article titles a custom font and nothing else if said font would cause design issues elsewhere.
◄► Tephra ◄► 20:31, 6 December 2020 (UTC)

On the other sites that use a custom font for the page header, so far I haven't seen any that actually look that good (granted I've only seen a few and have no idea how to find others). From a web design perspective I'm thinking what would be best for both desktop and mobile as well as for the themes coming down the line. With most of our traffic currently being from mobile It doesn't make sense to make a bunch of changes that mobile users won't be able to use or even see. If our goal is consistency then this is not the way to go about it, at least not until we get more ability to do stuff with mobile. -Eckserah ^{Head Dataminer} 21:32, 6 December 2020 (UTC)

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More than a week has passed now since the latest comment, and I feel somehow stuck; don't exactly know how to continue. I don't guess, this topic is worth a voting. So I try to summarize what's been said so far, as well as adding a personal point of view.

• As far as I can tell, the votes here aren't really different from the discussion on Discord. The only new opinion is J's one, which relativizes the 3:3 a little bit by using the term "hesitantly". So that's … 3.5:3.5?
• I think, we all can agree that using a different font would be indeed nice, but as inconsistent, as it might not happen that it can be displayed inside infoboxes, won't apply to categories, nor will it work on mobile.
• So we have some unspecific votes for complete italicizing of game titles, some unspecific votes against it at all and anywhere, and one vote (J's) against it in certain cases, namely for disambiguation suffixes.

Thoughts

• I think, most members of the community will speak against de-italicizing the pure game articles, which has become and is common here and everywhere.
• Consistency would then require to apply this style for all other instances (and such indeed is done on e.g. Wikipedia, except, due to technical reasons, for categories).
• Though we have to make a compromise for categories and mobile view, where this is technically not possible.
• Don't accepting any compromise would mean to italicize no single title – see the first point: no-go.
• It is also normal (again, also on Wikipedia) to italicize titles but leave following words and suffixes un-italicized. Such as the overview pages. As I already have implemented for FNV, FO2, FO3 and FO4 (and some others). Only FO76, FO1 and a few others are missing as of now.

Personal opinion

Though I opened this discussion by saying "consistency is an important point in wikiing", my personal view of the aesthetics of this doesn't really like the mishmash of styles: not for article names with a title prefix (where I can fully understand J's "hesitantly"), and not at all for the suffixes. Maybe a different font in general (read: for the whole wiki, or at least all article titles) would help, but as long as we don't have this, it indeed just isn't looking very good.

So my compromise – as it appears, we can't go without – would be to continue my work for the title prefixes, but to not apply it to suffixes.

All this font thing may be of interest for Leon, who's working on a restyling of the wiki. Maybe that's a future option.

If nothing speaks against this, or a voting is deemed necessary, I will continue my edits within the next days. -- -- You talkin' to me? -- cCContributions -- 17:40, 14 December 2020 (UTC)

My personal opinion is just don't add it for suffixes (game differentiators). It's really overdoing it and it looks bad. You don't see it on other wikis either. Just the main overview pages where it starts with <game> ... Otherwise do make it a vote with the three options, might not be such a bad idea. Jspoelstra (talk) 17:54, 14 December 2020 (UTC)

I still really don't agree on doing this considering the fact that it doesn't work on mobile at all. It also still doesn't look good even doing it on the game title as a suffix. -Eckserah ^{Head Dataminer} 22:50, 14 December 2020 (UTC)

Normally this wouuld be a matter of personal opinion, and I have to be upfront here and say that I don't feel strongly either way about which style we go with, if not both. With that being said, I acknowledge that the option being discussed here simply does not work for mobile users, and that's something we have to take seriously, since mobile browsing makes up the vast majority of our readers.

So unless this issue is fixed in some way, I am in support of Eck. ^寧靜 08:26, 15 December 2020 (UTC)

Just a note: being not displayed for mobile users, doesn't hurt them, either. -- -- You talkin' to me? -- cCContributions -- 10:11, 15 December 2020 (UTC)