Template talk:RTGS

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Usage of Italics

@Paul 012 firstly I would like to apologise for my part of disruptive editing. I didn't realise that the template edits would cause a big strain. regarding the use of italics, these should be set by default with the possibility to turn off. MOS:FOREIGNITALIC states that italics are generally use[d] [...] for words and phrases from non-English languages if they are written using the Latin alphabet, including Thai romanisations schemes.

MOS:BADITALICS makes an exception for foreign names in the text itself, and is generally implemented using {{lang}}. for example: Moo Deng is a cute hippo, but Moo Deng (RTGS: mu deng) is a pygmy hippo. the text inside parentheses is a direct transliteration and BADITALICS does not apply; however it would if editors chose to do {{lang|th|Mu Deng}} is a cute hippo (this is often for the purpose of accessbility in order for screen readers to properly enounce the text in the given language). in this case, Mu Deng is a cute hipoo would be bad italics.

I wish to keep italics on by default to follow how {{lang-xx}} works and as the pages that I have seen already implement italics correctly. having it on by default would therefore simply reduce redundancy. cheers! Juwan (talk) 12:08, 31 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for opening the discussion, and apologies for the snappiness of my edit summary. Reading through the MOS more carefully, your explanation does seem to be correct. Since the template is mostly used to provide parenthetical spelling guides, it makes sense that the text should probably be italicised to put emphasis on the spelling, even for proper nouns.

That said, the template's default behaviour since 2006 has been not to italicise, so it's a good idea to first advertise such a change to let editors know and adjust end uses accordingly if needed. I'll make a post at WT:WikiProject Thailand; it isn't very active with discussion, but there should be some people watching the page. Let's wait a few days to see if further comments are forthcoming.

A lot of instances of current usage have inline italic wikitext markup, but I checked and this doesn't seem to cause problems. There are, however, pages such as Eua Sunthornsanan, Phraya Anuman Rajadhon, Wat Kanlayanamit, and Palang Dharma Party, which format text within the RTGS template as boldfaced alternative names. These will look weird if also italicised. A closer look is needed to see if these are appropriate uses and italic=no should be added to the template, or inappropriate and the bold formatting removed, or if the text should be moved out of the template and formatted as part of the prose instead.

There's also the stylistic issue of whether RTGS glosses of proper nouns should be capitalised at all, but that can be discussed as a separate issue. --Paul_012 (talk) 13:13, 31 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

@Paul 012 please post to other editors interested in Thai articles! I was WP:BOLD to update the template exactly because the behaviour of the italics inside it wouldn't break anything. for the boldface uses of the template, I believe it is better to simply remove the boldface. if possible in the future, a bot could remove these by regex. Juwan (talk) 14:45, 31 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]