User talk:Archer1234

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Welcome To Wikipedia Greeting Archer1234, I wanted to be one of the first to wish you good luck on your adventures on Wikipedia. If you need any help please let me know. I hope you enjoy yourself, I recommend you take a look at some of the links below, even if you already know about Wikipedia. If you want to try out what your writing before you post it, try playing at the Sandbox. There, you can test out anything for fun. To contact me with questions or concerns, leave a comment HERE. Good Luck and hope to hear from you soon! Matthew Brandon Yeager Wikipedia Links Getting Started Introduction To Wikipedia • Wikipedia Tutorial • The Five Pillars Of Wikipedia • Editing Your First Page User pages • Talk pages • Tools • Manual Of Style • Frequently Asked Questions Getting Help Wikipedia's Help Page • Help For Editing Articles • Where To Ask Questions Or Make Comments Introduction To Wikipedia • Request Administrator Attention

[edit] Michael McCaul

I have removed some of your well-meant changes to the Michael McCaul article.

First, in the Category entries, the text after the category name is NOT for display and was not misspelled; it is a sorting key. The goal of the "sort key" is to make the article show up within the category where it's expected. Most of the time, for people, it's simply "Family_name, Personal_name", but for people with punctuation or mixed case in the names, it's not obvious to some people what should be done. The general rule can be summmarized as: "remove punction, first letter of each word uppercase, all others lowercase"; therefore "Mccaul" and not "McCaul". There are other weird exceptions, like British nobility, the guidelines are at Wikipedia:Categorization_of_people#Ordering_names_in_a_category.

Second, standard Wikipedia style does not normally embed honorifics such as "Mr./Mrs.", "Dr.", "Rep.", "President", etc., etc. in the main text of a person's own article, see for example Ronald Reagan. That's not an absolute rule; sometime using the honorific in a particular spot can improve the clarity of the writing, but it's generally discouraged. You'll note that honorifics are often used in references to other people, to help provide context; for example, in the Reagan article, there's a reference to Reagan challenging "President Gerald Ford" for the Republican nomination. I can't locate the style guideline on this tonight, it's somewhere in the WP:MOS.... Studerby 04:43, 30 July 2007 (UTC)

Studerby, thanks for the clarifications and education on category sorting and use of honorifics. I will note, however, that the text after the category name WAS misspelled as "Maccaul" vice "Mccaul". While I wasn't aware of the guidelines to deprecate mixed case in the sort, the spelling was incorrect nonetheless. Archer1234 00:16, 1 August 2007 (UTC)

Ahhh. There's a small but insistent group of editors who claim that all Gaelic-derived "Mac", "Mc", and "M'" names should be sorted under "Mac" and they will impose that misspelling on sorts from time to time. It's not in the written standard at all, and the issue is mostly focused in the older Scottish history articles (where it may make some sense to do so - the spelling of the era was more fluid a the time), but it spills everywhere and creates confusion. So far, efforts to get something explicitly written about it in the guideline have not met with success. I tend not to correct the mistaken "Mac" spellings when I see them, right now, hoping that we'll get a consensus written into the guidelines first without a fuss, but I may need to push the issue a little harder to get resolution. Probably more than you wanted to know. Studerby 06:14, 1 August 2007 (UTC)