Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Wikipedia style and naming

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)

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)

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)