Talk:The Wondaria Dream Parade

Dispute

According to WiKirby:Writing specifics:

Don't correct what is correct - Unless something is incorrect, don't correct it. Things like the Oxford comma or whether periods go inside quotes, for example, are correct either way.

Let's use The Wondaria Dream Parade as an example, though similar problems have popped up on other pages, too. Originally, one portion of the article read as such: Before entering the first main area, Kirby walks along the outside of the park in the dead of night, with no music—only the sound of chirping insects.

Said portion of the article was recently altered to this: Before entering the first main area, Kirby walks along the outside of the park in the dead of night, with no music — only the sound of chirping insects.

When it comes to using em dashes with a space in-between or not, they're both correct and trying to fix them when they don't need fixing violates the recently-added mantra in writing specifics. But that's just my opinion. What do you think? – Owencrazyboy17 (talk) 16:17, 21 April 2024 (UTC)

Not having a space between the em dash and the words makes it look like the em dash is conjoining two words into one… well, not quite one word, but one… er… word-unit. As I said in the edit summary when I reverted the initial reversion, "music-only" doesn't quite mean the same thing as "music - only"; the former is a single word-unit referring to something where, say, only the music is relevant, whereas the latter is just a bridge between one sentence portion ending with the word "music" and the next sentence portion starting with the word "only". The latter is clearly what is intended in this article. So, my reason for changing the article was to avoid confusion that could be caused by ambiguous grammar. (But seriously, what the heck kind of writing guide says that it's okay to bridge sentence portions with just an em dash and no spaces? I've gotten an earful about this sort of thing on Wikipedia as well, and I just don't get why.) --Luigifan18 (talk) 20:50, 21 April 2024 (UTC)

I think there have been issues in the past on WiKirby when it came to dashes not quite being used correctly. That said, the em dash being used on the page right now is quite long when compared to one that would be used to conjoin individual words. I get you're worried that people might read it as "music-only", but in the article, it's "music—only". There's a clear difference in how it looks, at least to me. The main point of the recently-added writing mantra is to stop editors bickering too much about how exactly to format something, as long as the essential information is conveyed and a correct standard is being used. It's meant to keep the focus on adding quality content to the wiki. Don't get me wrong, you've done a good job catching and fixing typos and other genuine formatting mistakes on pages, but let's try not to get too hung up on little details like this if there's nothing technically wrong with them. --Samwell (talk) 21:12, 21 April 2024 (UTC)

Personally, I would understand if this was between "music-only" and "music - only", but since it's "music—only" vs "music — only", as far as I know both uses are correct in English. I searched a bit, and most places said that they shouldn't be used with spaces, and this article in particular said:

"Spacing around an em dash varies. Most newspapers insert a space before and after the dash, and many popular magazines do the same, but most books and journals omit spacing, closing whatever comes before and after the em dash right up next to it."

It appears both are correct, hence why there doesn't need to be corrections. I also want to echo what Samwell said, I would prefer edits to focus on if information is correct and less about if it specifically is worded in a way that an editor prefers. - Gigi (talk • edits) 21:38, 21 April 2024 (UTC)

Luigifan18, if you don't comment on anything else from your side of things in the next few days, I will consider this particular point solved, and that both uses are correct and shouldn't be changed one way or another. But if you have more to comment, please do. - Gigi (talk • edits) 13:29, 25 April 2024 (UTC)