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Post by ottonomy
I’d give that several hundred thumbs up if I could. Alas, I’ve only got two, and the forum will only let me use one of those.
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Post by sketch
We spent a lot of time and effort litigating this issue only a couple years ago and settled on what we settled on, i.e., not this. Are we going to go through this every 2 or 3 years and change the entire wiki back to the other way? Do we need to relitigate the same issue over and over again?
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ALL US EDITORS READ: New USA road type guidance
the guidance linked above is now almost a decade old, but the link gives me a laugh every time i see it, so it stays (:
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Post by sketch
Do you mean a least common denominator type of approach? ;)

My position continues to be that using capital letters for Waze Noun Phrases (WNPs) is unnecessary, stilted, does not make text easier to read, is inconsistent with every other wiki in the world, and contributes to the TLA Hell we've all dug ourselves into.

Whatever discussion we had before was apparently conclusive enough that we did actually effect the not-capitalizing change in the wiki. That sounds like a conclusion to me. Do not mistake conclusiveness for unanimity.

I do not see a compelling reason to deviate from Wikipedia style guidelines (which we have in large part adopted) in this case at all. Why reinvent the wheel?

And if this ends up a (another?) stalemate, what do you propose as a tiebreaker, exactly? Only sensible one I can think of is "if we can't agree that one way is better than The Other or vice versa, go with whichever one is more standard, i.e., the one used by a typical wiki style guide." Well...
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ALL US EDITORS READ: New USA road type guidance
the guidance linked above is now almost a decade old, but the link gives me a laugh every time i see it, so it stays (:
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Post by sketch
Your examples do not track with the situation at hand and I think the reasons why are pretty obvious.
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ALL US EDITORS READ: New USA road type guidance
the guidance linked above is now almost a decade old, but the link gives me a laugh every time i see it, so it stays (:
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Post by tonestertm
HAHAHAHAHA "...litigating...." Awesome, Marc! :lol:

As Michael pointed out early on, the earlier discussion did not reach a solid conclusion, thus, the continuation of discussion.

On a personal note, I had intended a comprehensive post in that previous discussion, but during the course of my research, the discussion moved on, and by the time I was ready to post there would have been little point, as the attention span had lapsed. Unfortunately most discussions in here do not favor those of us who prefer to research and consider subjects in depth before posting an opinion.

As I've read through this discussion, a couple of things have jumped out at me.

Many of the admittedly off-the-cuff examples being posited are using the language of everyday discussion. In my mind the thing we are discussing is usage in the Wiki, which is the guide to which we point every beginning editor, and I find it unlikely that these constructs would be in Wiki language in the first place.

I can't put it any better than Blaine did, in saying,"This ensures that the reader understands that there is more nuance than the words present on the page indicate and does so in a concise way." A new editor needs every clue they can get, when attempting to wade into our ocean.

What's pertinent is Waze terms of art. In the same way that (referring to a previous comment) Waze Categories are common words, they hold a specific meaning within the Waze editing context, and in that usage, they become terms of art.

If it's a specific Waze usage, it should be so indicated, in whatever method that may be. (Capitalization feels the most natural to me for these "Waze nouns", especially since we do end up "acronym-izing" most of them). If it's a general reference then it doesn't get indication. I would have little problem with seeing "major highway" and "Major Highway" in a sentence together, should that come to pass, as it removes any ambiguity that indefinite reference creates.

I don't think anyone is going to encounter the term, Residential Point Place, in common usage. It's a Waze term of art, as are so many other phrases in play here. It's why I sometimes have occasion to caution well-meaning editors against using Waze jargon in UR responses. The average reporter has absolutely no clue as to the nuance and implications of a term like that. Likewise, neither does a green editor.

WME should not be considered a Holy Grail for correct capitalization of items. There have been so many errors and misspellings in the interface over the years, perhaps attributable in large part to non-native English speakers at the design helm, it can hardly be considered a reliable source.

People getting lazy (re: changes in capitalization over time) is also not a valid argument. In fact, almost any reference to This Page or That Page makes no sense, since we've never actually drafted anything even hinting at a Manual of Style. I can point to several recently crafted or fully re-worked Wiki pages which still contain numerous grammatical errors, and which do not adhere to simple rules of English, let alone Wikipedia's Manual of Style.

In my previous research, I did end up unearthing a section of the Wikipedia Manual of Style (note: their capitalization, even in the title) which would seem to support capitalization for our situation, but I'd have to dig it up again, and that might take too long for me to get this posted while it's still current.

Finally, there is precedent for changing long-standing, if somewhat gossamer, "guidelines", even in the absence of a change in editing policy. There is no reason not to bring an indeterminate former discussion to life once again. Thanks to you, Dwarflord, for bringing this back to life.

p.s. I regularly use Junction Box, Area Place, Residential Point Place, Point Place, and other capitalized terms in everyday Discord discussion, as these have specific Waze meanings, apart from any common usage someone might attempt to accord them. I would never even think to use Road or Segment in the same venue, unless I was specifically trying to call something out.
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Post by tonestertm
Actually, if I remember correctly, the rabbit hole I went down at the time had to do with capitalization, rather than terms of art, specifically, as the latter was a recent realization to me. I'll see if I can find what I had found before, it seems they've changed a few of their long-standing guidelines in the recent past. And that tiny, off-hand mention is hardly any sort of thorough guideline.

But, again, "we don't have to follow the Wikipedia style", right? ;)

AFAIC, what best suits our purposes is the best course of action, Wikipedia rules be damned. Those are intended to cover an extremely vast swath of topics, resulting in a Least Common Denominator type of approach, while we have some very specific, closely-held usage. Our purpose is to make as clear as possible, mainly for new editors, a dazzling array of specialized information. Again, I have trouble improving on Blaine's post, and agree with it about 99%.

I categorically disagree with a number opinions in your 10 point list, but agree that consistency is important.

That's all I have time for at the moment.
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Post by voludu2
Based on the current discussion, my opinion is that it would be easy to adopt the en.wikipedia.org manual of style for the USA wazeopedia. It it fairly well thought-out. It would be possible to make some small modifications to take into account that nearly every article in the wazeopedia is a technical article, and that most of the articles provide "how to" or guidance (something that does not belong in the wikipedia mainspace articles), but I think it would be easiest to deviate as little as possible simply because each deviation requires a long discussion. It would take a while to bring all of our pages into compliance with this guideline, but that's no reason not to adopt a manual of style. That way, anyone trying to fix misspellings, correct comma splices and other grammar errors, would know which way to go with capitalizations and other stylistic options at the same time - once the style guidelines are agreed, we don't need to discuss such details in the same discussion as how to accurately represent facts about the Waze-provided products or the generally-accepted guidance on how to map.

I suggest we NOT regard technical terms like "minor highway" as proper nouns.
What we are really trying to do when we capitalize these terms is to emphasize them. We don't need to try to cast them as proper nouns in order to justify emphasizing technical terms.
Instead of capitalizing for emphasis (this would be our only option on a platform with no formatting options), I suggest we follow the en.wikipedia.org style guidelines and wrap the emphasized text in <em>...</em> and/or start using the {{em}} wiki template to achieve the same. The USA wazeopedia produces italics when we use the <em> tags, based on the specifics of the "skin" (CSS style choices).

Wikipedia style guidelines say that the first time a technical term appears on a page (or if it is a long page, the first time it appears in a section), it should be wikilinked to a reference for that term. We could also use a tooltip for a hover-over-pop-up for the term, if the explanation is short enough to work in a tooltip, and if we have tooltips available. If a term needs to be emphasized at some other point in the text, use the <em></em> tag.

We can reduce the need for using emphasis, as well as the temptation to capitalize, by doing a good job defining our technical terms / jargon, and by writing pages as simply as possible. There is no need use "RTC" when writing about segment closures (except to note that some editors use that acronym as an abbreviation for closures). "FC" does not have an identical meaning to "road type" or even to "correct road type".
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Post by voludu2
DwarfLord - I did read your posts, followed your discussion of reasons for and against treating technical terms as proper nouns, and I generally agree with you that we may be able to write more clearly and concisely about many topics if we have an easy and well-understood way to differentiate between technical and "everyday" use of some words that the editing community commonly uses. I had suggested doing this by using standard emphasis tags when introducing a term for the first time on the page, but I see that you are talking about something different.

This puts me in mind of how discussion documents and usage guides for various computer systems have long used special formatting/notation to make it easier to understand what is required, optional, etc, in a line of input. Some specialized documents even define their own grammar/notation. Wrapping things in various types of brackets is then well-understood throughout the document.

I don't think a lot of square and angle brackets thrown in the middle of a block of text is going to make it easier to read, though. We might need some other type of formatting.
But I think I understand you saying you are looking for SOME KIND of way to consistently designate words being used as specific WME-related terms, rather than being used in their "everyday" sense.

Maybe that would work. Maybe by creating wiki template(s) like
{{place}} and {{freeway}}, or perhaps {{WME|place}} and {{WME|freeway}} and {{WME|<any word at all>}}.

There are a lot of options for what that {{WME}} wiki template would do to a word. Use a different font? Highlight, italicize, embolden, render in all caps, wrap in some kind of brackets, change the color? Whatever it takes.

If Ohad-Ron had had a nice {{WME}} template, and that template were set to create yellow highlights, he could have created:
Overlapping places - in a few places there are duplicate or very similar Places on of top of another. It is safe to delete one of them.
We could also write
Freeways are controlled-access divided highways. In the USA, the freeway road type is used (see exceptions below). In some parts of the world, the freeway road type is used for the longest-distance routes, even when they don't meet the definition of freeway.
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