Help talk:Style guidelines

Welcome to the discussion! Check out this short guide if you're unsure about how talk pages work.

New topics should be added to the top of this page, not the bottom.

Remember to always keep things civil!

Signing lived experiences

When writing their lived experience, should the person sign their (user)name? I understand some might not want to have their experience linked to them, so maybe the guidelines could mention that you can put your username if you wish to? I also understand that that might make the articles a bit clunky/harder to navigate --Fire Eider (talk) 16:37, 23 August 2022 (UTC)

Handling citations

How do we do citations? I tried to fix Overlapping neurotypes but I don't know if that looks right. I want some more info before I fix other pages, please

It looks good to me --Fire Eider (talk)

For now we have this: Help:Style guidelines#References

Citing community consensus

How should we assert "distilled wisdom" such as ABA being harmful? (It seems important to do so, see e.g. this thread: https://twitter.com/WIRblog/status/1563002859246956544)

We could use phrases like "Many people within the autistic community agree that...", but we want to avoid "false controversies" (thanks @fochti for this phrase!) where it seems like there's disagreement on a topic when really there's broad agreement.

Much of what the #ActuallyAutistic community has done is share our experiences until we collectively distill certain things that seem broadly true to us. This is like What We Do, and it would be really valuable to share this knowledge with with new #ActuallyAutistic people and with the world at large.

We're talking about knowledge about knowledge: not just "ABA is harmful", but "There's #ActuallyAutistic consensus that ABA is harmful"

Special citations for asserting community consensus

One possibility would be to have have certain special citations:

• [community-consensus]: means there's rough community consensus within the #ActuallyAutistic community
• [community-controversy]: means there's meaningful controversy within the #ActuallyAutistic community; sizeable groups on more than one side
• [experimental-theory]: experimental theory, not yet tested and accepted or rejected by the #ActuallyAutistic community at large

Examples:

• ABA is harmful [community-consensus] [1] [2] [3]
• Most people within the #ActuallyAutistic community prefer identity-first language [community-consensus]
• Masking isn't worth it [community-controversy]
• Monotropism explains everything about autism [experimental-theory]

Tags like "[community-consensus]" could link to an explanation of what community consensus means, how knowledge is distilled within the #ActuallyAutistic community, etc.

Very open to suggestions about what the actual tags should be. For example maybe instead of [community-consensus] it should be [actuallyautistic-consensus] or [autistic-consensus] or [aa-consensus] or [our-consensus] or [consensus] or [consensus-view] or...

Special language for asserting community consensus

Alternatively we could write out certain key phrases:

• There's consensus within the #ActuallyAutistic community that ABA is harmful.
• There's consensus within the #ActuallyAutistic community that most autists within the #ActuallyAutistic community prefer identity-first language
• There's controversy within the community about whether masking is worth it
• There's an experimental theory that monotropism explains everything

Writing out the phrases feels a bit wordy, and also shoves the content of the sentence to the end. Could also be written the other way around:

• ABA is harmful, according to rough consensus within the community.
• Most people within the #ActuallyAutistic prefer identity-first language, according to rough consensus within the community.

But this still feels wordy. I think I like the special citation form.

Citation storms

Another possibility (which we could do in addition to using tags like [community-consensus]) would be to have "citation storms", where we maybe cite like 50 or 100 Twitter threads of lived experience of #ActuallyAutistic people.

But a citation storm can't stand in for something like [community-consensus] tags, because a citation storm on its own doesn't assert that there aren't other popular views within the community.

--AutExplorer (talk) 15:07, 26 August 2022 (UTC)