Style guide wiki now up for online copy editors

After calling for a universal style guide in a recent post, well, here it is:

Style guide for online sub-editors 

Thanks to journalism.co.uk for the set-up. It’s editable for your learning pleasure and is full of tips, links and explanations for print subs moving over to online. Would be great to hear the input and suggestions of subs and copy editors, or go to the wiki and add your tuppence worth there.

There’s loads of things I haven’t covered, or haven’t covered enough. Please help and make this work-in-progress a useful resource.

Let’s create a universal style guide for web subs

Get your red pen out, or should that be grey mouse? The first steps towards a style guide for subs and copy editors working online are being taken by Martin Stabe, online editor at Retail Week. Huzzah!

This follows The Times finally changing its style for Bombay to Mumbai. Because even though the city officially changed its name in 1995, the recent attacks have zoomed Mumbai up the Google search rankings, so much so that it has now become the preferred search term of UK users. It seems The Times is playing the SEO game – and rightly so.

Martin says he’ll be posting a public Google Docs soon for subs to contribute to. But I wonder if a wiki might allow for a wider take on this, encompassing a central place to house preferred search terms across a multitude of topics. Think of all the online women’s sites, for example, that would like to know that ‘lose weight’ is the search term to write in over ‘diet’ (according to Google Trends).

Anyone up for it?

Also, since ‘fall’ scores higher than ‘autumn’ and ‘copy editors’ beats ’subs’, should we also start brushing up on our American English?

Chief, what’s our style on f*ck?

Interested to see the Guardian’s readers’ editor pointing out how swear-happy the paper is becoming – to the moral outrage of middle-class parents everywhere. Siobhain Butterworth this week said:

Is the Guardian getting ruder? It seems so. The paper published the f-word 33 times in 1985, 495 times in 2000 and 843 times in 2007. The incidence is higher if web content is taken into account.

Now I can’t remember if I’ve ever had to sub out a swear word. It certainly hasn’t appeared in any style guide I’ve come across – although the 1990s’ fuck-off ringbinder that was the Radio Times style guide probably had a section in there somewhere on how to style with replacement asterisk gobbledygook.

Mostly, though, the F-word appears in direct quotes – so whaddyagonnado? Where it’s real-life speech it reflects that person and subs don’t tend to mess with it, even when there’s some temptingly bad grammar, innit. But maybe this is a style clash. The Guardian wants to be seen as edgy. But I can’t imagine most of the mags or websites I work for letting the F-word go through.

So I thought… I know! Cuh! Sheer brilliance (okay, well, blindingly obvious.) I’ll look up how the media deals with that doyen of profanity, Gordon Ramsay.

On Female First, they open up an interview with the F-Word king like this:

Accepted journalistic practice dictates that changing the quotes in a celebrity interview is entirely unacceptable; the fast track to career suicide.

Nevertheless, in all honesty, almost every quote you are about to read has been doctored, for the simple reason that the interviewee is Gordon Ramsay, a walking, talking swearbox in a chef’s hat.

At The Independent, they’ve left more than the F-word in but with a caveat headline:

The gospel according to Gordon Ramsey (Warning: it may be enough to put you off your breakfast)

While on a 2002 BBC transcipt of his Desert Island Discs session, he appears not to have sworn once. Did he keep it clean for radio – or was he edited?

If the Guardian is getting ruder, and swearing is being devalued as shock currency, then perhaps house style guides should introduce a policy. As for me, I’m sticking an asterisk in there – because it’s big, funny, clever and quaintly British, what with us being such a nation of virulent potty-mouths.

Anyone subs out there with a take on this, or am I just talking a load of old Charlie Oscar Charlie Kilo?