I’ve been meaning to work on improving the style guidelines for Italian for some time.
The main points I intend to address:
- The current guideline is very verbose and focuses more on explaining Italian orthography than on style matters.
- The guideline also includes comments from the original drafter.
- The Italian and English parts of the document are not fully aligned.
- Some terminology is imprecise (e.g. “names” rather than “nouns”), which can create confusion.
Before I draft anything and go through the formal process, though, I would like to hear from other users who rely on this guideline: what do you find helpful/unhelpful? Anything in particular you consider essential to have in a revised guideline (or that would simply make your life easier when editing Italian releases)?
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It took me some time, but my revision is complete: Italian style 2025
The new structure of the document is based on the Spanish guideline (which I chose as it is well developed and because many grammar rules are equally applicable).
There is one notable change compared to the previous guideline: I am now recommending to capitalise group names beyond the specific case mentioned in the previous guideline. In that regard, the previous guideline was (a) fairly arbitrary, as there is no generally agreed rule on that matter in the language; (b) generally ignored by most editors anyway. So in a way we are just codifying the prevalent practice.
I will open a style ticket next. If anybody has improvements to suggest, please flag them here!
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…a style ticket later, the new guideline is already transcluded and in force:
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