Nesdev wiki talk:Manual of Style/RFC 2119

This should be deprecated or deleted

After Bregalad left a comment about the use of MUST, I ended up taking a look at the use of this template across the wiki.

This should not be part of our manual of style for this wiki (do we even have one? this seems to be the only page in this namespace). All of these words have perfectly normal English meanings, and those are the meanings that new users come in expecting. Putting them in ALLCAPS and insisting that they have some specific meaning (which is only obscurely different from their normal English meaning) creates confusion and slows comprehension of the article. An infobox wasting 100 words to try to explain that "MUST" means "must, but pedantically" is counter-productive. The capitalization style of RFC 2119 is jargon used only by a few particular groups of people; the vast majority of users are not familiar with it, and it wastes our time.

I looked through the wiki and found no use of this template that I thought contributed to better understanding of the meaning of the words in question, and I found several cases where MUST was being used incorrectly. I'd recommend deleting this page, though this wiki doesn't seem to have a deletion request process. - Rainwarrior (talk) 11:49, 26 May 2015 (MDT)

Why in hell does typing RFC 2119 automatically create an external link??? - Rainwarrior (talk) 11:51, 26 May 2015 (MDT)

Mediawiki feature(?): http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:RFC —Lidnariq (talk) 13:15, 26 May 2015 (MDT)

See RfcKeywords on W3C Wiki. If MUST was being misused, it should be fixed. But just because something can be misused doesn't mean it's useless. For example, look at all the other RFCs that cite this RFC in the same way the {{RFC 2119}} template does; is it useless there? And if it's useless, why is the delusion that it's useful so widespread? Should I reword all uses of all-caps MUST along the lines "Failure to do so causes undefined behavior"? --Tepples (talk) 16:55, 26 May 2015 (MDT)

No, absolutely DO NOT redefine what "MUST" is supposed to mean and try to impose this new personal definition of the word on others. That's my primary issue with this! You're creating nonstandard meanings for words and then expecting others to read some documentation to keep up with you. The word "must" is perfectly fine already; just use English words as they already exist. I don't care if some people have a use for RFC 2119 elsewhere, it's not helping here. - Rainwarrior (talk) 17:30, 26 May 2015 (MDT)

"personal definition"--The IETF is hardly a person creating a personal definition; RFC 2119 is a standard set by the organisation eighteen years ago. (As for tepples creating a "personal definition" he is just suggesting a rephrasing this particular meaning of MUST into the vernacular; not redefining it.) "perfectly normal"? English (well, language in general) is fairly extensively ambiguous. I think it is[/was] useful for distinguishing these particular meanings. The group that uses these...is those creating technical computer document specifications, which we are/do; I find it useful to discriminate advice for complying with the specification from requirements of the specification.

Furthermore, not all of our readers are native English speakers. Defining the difference between should and must is a useful thing. (And one doesn't have to click if one doesn't find it necessary to be clarified, meaning no time lost!)

(Perhaps better to contend a wide adoption to counter "particular groups of people", than its usefulness? Using it to imply usefulness is an argumentum ad populum.)Myask (talk) 17:43, 26 May 2015 (MDT)