MediaWiki talk:Tagline

From Wikipedia, ...

I don't know if this has been discussed before as I'm new to this Wikipedia. The text below every article title reads "From Wikipedia, a free encyclopedia written in simple English for easy reading.", which, if I didn't know WP already, would make me think it's a free encyclopedia written in simple English for easy reading. Shouldn't it be "From Simple English Wikipedia, ..." instead? Pilaf 00:14, 13 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Does the French Wikipedia say the equivalent of "From the French Wikipedia..."? The only reason the tagline is any different from the "normal English" Wikipedia is to make a clear distinction, otherwise the sites look too similar. -- Netoholic @ 06:58, 13 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I'm with Pilaf. Much better would be From Simple English Wikipedia, .... Other languages, in my opinion, are not 100% relevant because they don't have any "namespace collision" to worry about. In other words, if a Spanish speaker says, "I saw an article in Wikipedia," the default assumption would be that she's talking about the Spanish-language version. No such presumption exists when a "Simple English" speaker mentions WP. Therefore it seems to me that SE WP needs to be "branded" separately from English Wikipedia, and Pilaf's version suggestion for that message seems appropriate.

BTW, fr Wikipedia has no corresponding message; I suppose that would be another option. - PhilipR 17:35, 13 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I know this has led to confusion in the past. I remember a crtiticism article on Wikipedia which went on about how poorly written articles were, when in fact the journalist had been reading Simple English articles all along. I think changing the tagline would help clarify this kind of confusions. Pilaf 01:47, 15 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Um, how about if it said "From the Wikipedia project, a free encyclopedia written in simple English for easy reading."? Somehow I think that was what was meant by "From Wikipedia,..."

But that does start to seem like we're packing a lot into a short message, and might require disambiguation by restating as "A free encyclopedia written in simple English for easy reading, from the Wikipedia project."

I wouldn't be opposed to "From Simple English Wikipedia, a free encyclopedia written for easy reading." -- Netoholic @ 16:45, 14 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Then why don't we do it? The 's' in simple needs to be uppercase, it's been bugging me for ages Archer7

Change

Would anybody want to bite my head off if I said I wanted to change this to say Simple English Wikipedia, and remove the period and italic formatting? J Di 03:27, 10 March 2007 (UTC)

I'm pretty sure the italics are built in (which is good because I think it should be there anyway), but other than that, the change seems like a good idea to me. -- Creol(talk) 15:36, 11 March 2007 (UTC)

I think MediaWiki:Monobook.css is what's making it italic, though I could be wrong. J Di 15:40, 11 March 2007 (UTC)

It's not italic for me, but I'm using cologne blue. More to the point: I would prefer a tagline like

From Simple English Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (without .)

This should be clear enough to avoid confusion with enWP, but also short enough not to overwhelm the reader. After all, this is Simple English Wikipedia. Actually the word encyclopedia isn't simple English, but I cannot think of a replacement right now. Also, the period isn't there on either English or German WP, and I think there is no reason not to be consistent with the two largest WPs. --rimshot^talk 18:53, 11 March 2007 (UTC)

If I'm right about what's making the text italic, then it's not italic for you because the code is in MediaWiki:Monobook.css, not MediaWiki:Common.css or MediaWiki:Cologneblue.css, which doesn't even exist. J Di 19:23, 11 March 2007 (UTC)

Yes, and very obviously so. Monobook.css has only two sections, one of which is for the tagline. I've looked at enWP with the Monobook skin (haven't done so in ages) and noticed that the text isn't in italics there. For consistency, we should probably remove the italics here as well. It is also given a smaller font size, 92% instead of 100%. All in all, I don't think the formatting is very important, though. The text is certainly what we should think about first.

Oh, and if you want to change the style only for yourself, you can add stuff to your own monobook.css (or cologneblue.css, as in my case). --rimshot^talk 10:00, 12 March 2007 (UTC)

Updating tagline

Following up from Wikipedia:Simple talk/Archive 130#Proposal: Change the tagline that appears below the title on every page, I read that discussion as consensus to change this to From the Simple English Wikipedia. Could someone please do so? {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 08:37, 7 October 2020 (UTC)

 Done -Djsasso (talk) 15:59, 7 October 2020 (UTC)

@Djsasso: Shouldn't it read "from the Simple English Wikipedia..."; that seems to make more sense to me. --IWI (talk) 22:59, 7 October 2020 (UTC)

Could go either way I suppose. There wasn't a the there before either so what it was changed to is the equivalent of what was there before. I think the difference is if you are thinking of "Simple English Wikipedia" as a place or a thing. If you think of it as a thing then the is probably the more appropriate, if you think of it as a place then lack of it is more appropriate. -Djsasso (talk) 11:45, 8 October 2020 (UTC)

@Djsasso: Well I refer to "Wikipedia" without "the", but for the languages it seems to add "the". I would not say the sentence "I am going to edit Simple English Wikipedia", I would say "I am going to edit the Simple English Wikipedia". I would, however, always say that I am "editing Wikipedia". I think the difference is that we are referring to a singular project now. When it was "Wikipedia" alone, it was more general. --IWI (talk) 17:31, 8 October 2020 (UTC)

@Djsasso: My preference would be to keep the "the", wikilink the about page, and remove the "the free encyclopedia", since that was the version proposed and supported at Simple talk. (I'd guess the way changes work here is probably more informal than at en-WP since this wiki is so much smaller, but from what I'm used to there, it's surprising to see any project-wide change implemented in a way that's not strictly to-the-letter.) The current configuration looks like we are declaring the Simple English Wikipedia to be the singular free encyclopedia, which reads weirdly because that's the same tagline as the separate non-simple English Wikipedia. {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 09:13, 11 October 2020 (UTC)