virtual Reality Headset

The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review after discussing it on the closer's talk page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

The result of the move request was: No consensus to move. Although supporters argue that this fits better with MOS recommendations and may be more precise, opposers note that most usage (in both generalized and specialized sources) does not use the hyphen; Wikipedia should reflect general usage on this point. Both arguments have some merit so I'm not finding a clear consensus to move. A general RfC on the hyphenation of virtual reality, as suggested by Masem, may help to establish overall consensus. (non-admin closure) (t · c) buidhe 22:14, 2 April 2021 (UTC)

• Virtual reality headset → Virtual-reality headset
• Virtual reality game → Virtual-reality game

– MOS:HYPHEN (hyphenate compound modifiers), and to be WP:CONSISTENT with probably 1000+ other hyphenation RMs over the years. This article is about headsets for virtual reality, not "reality headsets" that are virtual. PS: No, it doesn't matter that the gaming press usually doesn't hyphenate. Journalism, a highly clipped style geared toward expediency, drops all punctuation that it can get away with. WP does not, and we have our own style manual for good reasons.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  09:29, 24 March 2021 (UTC); added new VR game article, 01:33, 25 March 2021 (UTC)

• Oppose per nom. If nom admits that the usage elsewhere in the relevant press/sources is to not include the hyphen, then Wikipedia shouldn't either, end of story. Who are we to say they're being "lazy"? Wikipedia shouldn't just rename entities willy-nilly. Note that it's not just the press (e.g. [1]), it's the manufacturers themselves as well as random storefronts as well as scholarly articles (google scholar search) that don't use the hyphenated variation. Past a certain point this becomes just making up a name that has no backing elsewhere. SnowFire (talk) 17:50, 24 March 2021 (UTC)
  • "No backing", like, say, Encyclopaedia Britannica [2]?! That took less than 10 seconds to find via Google, in the first page of search results. And you're engaging in the WP:Specialized-style fallacy, which RM (and the rest of WP) rejects over and over again: Sources reliable for background material about a subject, whether that's video games or gastric surgery or flamenco, are not reliable sources for how best to write English-language encyclopedic material about it, since those sources are not produced by linguistics, communication experts, etc. The reliable sources for that are the major style guide, which are what our own style guide is derived from. [sigh] This discussion has been had about 1,000 times previously on Wiki English. And you know that. It's very tiresome to see people re-re-re-attempt the same fallacious "write video game articles the way gamers write" arguments.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  01:33, 25 March 2021 (UTC)
    • Why are you the one sighing? I'm the one who should be. First off, that specialized style fallacy page is misused by you in my opinion (dislike a source? Just call it specialized!). Second off, it's a straw-man; I never said "ha ha only the gaming press matters", that's just the argument you want it to be (which, since you're complaining about having this disagreement before, you should already know is not gaming specific!). [3] is the Gray Lady using the non-hyphenated form for one of many possible examples in other "serious" sources. You found a rare example that uses the hyphen, congrats, I did do my due diligence before posting the above comment - if you simply search for virtual reality headset / game in general, you almost never see the hyphenated form, no matter the source you check, so it's more like an "everything" argument. Whether you trust experts or hoi polloi, the answer is the same, the non-hyphenated form predominates, so that's the "right" one. And it's your arguments that have been rejected many times before when there's an attempt to impose a never-seen-elsewhere style on Wikipedia (good ol' Star Trek Into Darkness), so it's not as if this is some settled, I'm-right-and-everyone-else-is-wrong deal.
    • Finally, I brought it up before by mentioning the manufacturers, but there is a corporate WP:ABOUTSELF to be mentioned here as a supporting note. If they all want to call their product some term... let them. SnowFire (talk) 06:13, 25 March 2021 (UTC)
      • That's kind of a Gish gallop of unrelated distractions. I'll try to isolate them:
        • You appear not to have actually understood WP:SSF at all. It has nothing to do whether anyone doesn't "like" something, nor with "a source" (nor "I'm right, others are wrong" – cf. WP:WINNING). It's about the reasoning presented, that closely specialized/involved parties (e.g. your "manufacturers as well as ... storefonts", i.e. people who generally write about gaming subjects in exactly the same style as gamer websites). Cf. Masem's related SSF arguments at the WT:VG thread, in which he posits (incorrectly) that there can be no ambiguity because "reality game" isn't a thing (as the kids say these days) – the same argument you've made about "reality headsets". This idea is entirely rooted in prior, topically specialized knowledge. In order for the natural linguistic ambiguity to be erased in one of these cases, the reader must be entirely certain that "reality game" and "reality headset" are not constructions that refer to anything. So, yes, it is the specialized-style fallacy, just with citation to specialized sources replaced with blatant assumption of pre-existing expertise. Even if these meaning propositions turned out to be true right now, they could change at any time. It already has changed for "reality game" which exists in the wild as a term unto itself, both in and out of videogame contexts.
        • What journals are doing is not a good indicator for hyphenation; all of the sciences routinely drop hyphenation in compound in terms of art, in experts-to-other-experts writing, because they are already understood by everyone in the narrow target audience. You'll even find a rule about this in the AMA, APA, and other medical and science style guides (e.g. to write "long slit spectroscopy" instead of "long-slit spectroscopy". WP hyphenates such terms (yes, you can find exceptions, but they're exist the articles were created mostly by subject-matter specialists used to the anti-hyphen style, and no one's bothered RMing them yet).
        • WP does not use news style, as a matter of clear policy (WP:NOT#NEWS), and virtually nothing in MoS is derived from news style guides of any kind. And NYT's is widely divergent in many ways even from others in that sector. It is not a reliable source on how to write encyclopedic English (nor a reliable source for gamer jargon, which seems to be the other angle being pursued by some here, at cross-purposes to each other).
        • The style exceptions that have been made are much fewer that you seem to think, and most of them are not comparable to this at all; mostly they involve work titles, trademarks, personal names, and other proper names, and always for highly case-specific reasons. E.g. Star Trek Into Darkness is kept in that form (not "into") specifically because the title is a pun, serving simultaneously as both a phrase meaning, basically, 'a trek, into darkness, among the stars', and also a traditional title/subtitle pair, "Star Trek: Into Darkness", just without the colon. Someone even found sourcing about this being the specific intent. It is a strange outlier, not a norm. If you look through all our titles of published works, you'll see that "into" is normally lowercase in them per MOS:5LETTER.
        • You're approaching this wrongheadedly. Title style on WP is not determined by a "majority wins" count. (You're thinking of WP:COMMONNAME, in which we use the most common of two or more competing different names – not different minor styles of the same name. See below: COMMONNAME is not a style policy. Every single attempt to make any style matter into policy instead of a guideline matter has failed; the community does not support elevating style quibbles to policy level, at all.) It's about being consistent, and consistently helpful for non-expert readers, above being maximally convenient for experts (or for lazy editors who don't like reaching an extra two inches for the - key). The central point of MOS:HYPHEN is to employ an "optional" hyphen when doing so will be helpful for some readers. This is the exact opposite of journalistic and scholarly style, which drop every hyphen that can be dropped as long as the average reader (of the specific target audience) won't need it. It's a big difference, and "well, news and journals aren't hyphenating this" is basically a meaningless, tautological observation. Other encyclopedias hyphenating, however, is very instructive. If this still isn't sinking in, try this: en.WP's "specific target audience" is every single person in the world, of any age or education level, who has sufficient English fluency to read our article and get the overall gist of it.
        • We make an exception to MoS's defaults when a specific topic is styled a certain way with virtually no high-profile exceptions. (E.g., there seem to be no major publishers who write "Apple Iphone", so "iPhone" is an exception to MOS:TM's rule not to employ odd capitalization found in trademarks and logos.) When other encyclopedias (for starters) can immediately and without any effort be found using "virtual-reality headset", this test has already failed.
        • No, WP doesn't care what manufacturers prefer; see WP:OFFICIALNAME. If we did, then the entire MOS:TM and MOS:TITLES guidelines would simply be deleted. WP generally doesn't care what subjects of any kind prefer when it comes to anything at all, per WP:NPOV and other principles (WP:CONSISTENT, WP:NOT#PROMO, etc.), with the sole exception of MOS:DEADNAME matters (rooted in WP:BLPPRIV policy – it's not some style variance made up out of nowhere). WP:ABOUTSELF allows us to use primary sources to gather some non-controversial facts; it does not not permit a subject (or its intellectual property owner) to dictate how we write for our audience (nor does it permit a wikiproject or other topical cluster of editors to force that preference proxy. But "virtual-reality noun" isn't anyone's trademark anyway, so ABOUTSELF arguments are just off-topic.
         — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 
        • • I will be succinct. In my opinion (which you can hopefully agree I am the expert on, even though your own opinion differs), the core Wikipedida philosophy is adherence to sources, especially when in doubt. The sources always win, especially for article titles rather than running text. If you want to convince me of the rightness of a move, then I'll be convinced if I saw a preponderance of sources hyphenate when I do a simple news search. SnowFire (talk) 03:27, 30 March 2021 (UTC)
• Oppose move. No one is taking the current name to mean it's a virtual "reality headset". The hyphen is unnecessary. O.N.R. ^(talk) 18:26, 24 March 2021 (UTC)
  • You don't know that; you cannot magically read the minds of every single one of WP's millions of daily readers, many of whom are children and non-native English speakers. We have a style guide for a reason. It says to hyphenate compound modifiers for a reason. The added case of what is presently titled Virtual reality game is an even better example of confusion potential. There are surely VG spinoffs of "reality TV" shows by now, and given the name of that genre, it would be an entirely reasonable assumption for anyone not steeped in gamer jargon to assume that "reality game" is the corresponding term for games based on those shows.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  01:33, 25 March 2021 (UTC)
    • User:Old Naval Rooftops, without a hyphen it's what is called a momentary ambiguity fork. We try to minimise their occurrence, because they do in the end add little bits here and there to the reader's cognitive burden—especially that of the unfamiliar reader. Tony (talk) 05:23, 25 March 2021 (UTC)
• Comment Given the number of pages that are "Virtual reality (noun)" in various name spaces, it may be better to consider a wider RFC on this. My read of MOS:HYPHEN says the hyphen is preferred but not required (in the line "A hyphen can help to disambiguate", "can" being the key word). This would apply to other technologies like mixed and augmented reality too. --Masem (t) 02:15, 25 March 2021 (UTC)
• Support—Sensible improvement in readability, even though slight. The US journal I'm submitting to soon would be happy with that hyphen, BTW. Tony (talk) 05:20, 25 March 2021 (UTC)
• Support – For the sake of readers not already familiar with the terminology, it is a good idea for Wikipedia to use the mechanism of hyphenation afforded by the English grammar to clarify how to parse these terms, even if insiders don't need it. Dicklyon (talk) 01:37, 26 March 2021 (UTC)
• Oppose. The convention of not hyphenating this phrase is clearly preferred over hyphenating, in general usage outside Wikipedia (not merely in "specialist" usage, with all due respect to the nominator's essay Wiki: Specialized-style fallacy). Adumbrativus (talk) 02:44, 26 March 2021 (UTC)
• Oppose, the non-hyphenated version is clearly the common name. Devonian Wombat (talk) 04:45, 26 March 2021 (UTC)
  It strikes me as odd that you and some others care so little for the uninitiated reader that you're OK letting them puzzle over the default English parse which would be that this refers to a reality headset (or reality game) that is virtual. This kind of confusion is best not inflicted on our readers, and all it takes to fix it is the hyphen. Why object to that? Dicklyon (talk) 07:02, 26 March 2021 (UTC)
  And Devonian Wombat is engaging in the predictable WP:Common-style fallacy now. WP:COMMONNAME is not, never has been, and never will be a style policy. WP:AT and the naming conventions guidelines defer to MoS on style matters. MoS's consistent rule on style deviations from what MoS prescribes: don't do it unless the variance is virtually universal in sources. When it takes less than 10 seconds to find Encyclopaedia Britannica (the closest and best model WP has for how to write English in an encyclopedic register) using "virtual-reality headset", then obviously that universality condition is not met. People get confused on this because they mistake COMMONNAME for being about every aspect of the form of a name. But it is not and cannot be, or it would simply eliminate all applicability of MoS to any title question ever. Yet most RMs are in fact settled by recourse to MoS. What COMMONNAME is, is the policy that tells us to use Resident Evil not Biohazard as the name in our articles on that video game and franchise, because that is the most common title in English. It has no effect on style questions of any kind (e.g. if the logo had been "RESIDENT EVIL" and many sources wrote it that way, WP would not, per MoS rules like MOS:TITLES, MOS:TM, and MOS:ALLCAPS).
  I don't know what it is about the videogame editor crowd, and a few of others (dance people, military-focused editors, and certain sports wikiprojects) that makes them so frequently try to pretend that "their" topic is magically immune to site-wide guidelines and policies and that they can force WP to write like a gamer website or magazine. If WP actually wrote articles on gamer topics the way gamers write for other games, and used the style of archaeology journals in our archaeology articles, and borrowed sportswriter habits for the tone of our sports article, WP would have no style guide at all (no one would ever consult it), and the site would not be encyclopedic, but basically a collection of wildly inconsistent "group blog" articles written for entirely different audiences who do not understand each other.
   — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  08:41, 26 March 2021 (UTC)
  The VR/AR/MR topic area is more than just video games (in my work to make the VR game article) even though that's the primary use of these techs. And I think it is the issue that it extremely rare (not completely absent as proven) to see "virtual reality" when used as an adjective phrase to be used with a hyphen in mainstream, academic, or specialized press, and thus appears glaring "wrong" as proposed. Obviously the MOS is trying to make sure things are easier to read in prose for WP's purpose, and given that the bulk of these articles start with "something something in virtual reality (VR) something something" and then only refer to "virtual reality" as "VR" and never see it spelled out in full, its also why it rarely comes up in the prose as well. A question I would have is that if articles titles are expected to follow MOS rules since these are appearing out of prose. (I realize they would cause problems in prose but piped links exist for that purpose). --Masem (t) 13:53, 26 March 2021 (UTC)
• Update: proof that "reality game" is ambiguous: It takes only a few moments to find this phrase (without pre-modifiers like "virtual", "augmented", "mixed", "alternat[iv]e", that form well-defined synergistic compounds) in real-world use in various contexts, including with regard to videogames, and in academic material covering, sociological media analysis, philosophy, game theory and network analysis as applied to human social interaction, etc. It's clear that "reality game" has become a generalized VG genre term, and that it also has unrelated meanings in various fields:
  • Immersive Reality Game of the Year: The single game released on an immersive reality platform that best utilizes the attributes of the platform to entertain users ("Immersive reality game" or "immersive reality" doesn't appear to be a unitary term; it's "reality [game]" modified by "immersive" as a narrowing descriptor. The latter redirects to Immersion but neither term appears in that article.)
  • "creative adventure reality game"
  • "this choose-your-own-adventure reality game"
  • "Reality game: Contemporary violence and denaturization of language"
  • "Plato, a reality game in four levels"
  • "A reality game to cross disciplines: Fostering networks and collaboration .... The rise of reality gaming introduces a new possibility: that games can directly shape real-world networks, even as they educate."
   — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  08:55, 26 March 2021 (UTC)

  PS: I'm also finding "reality headset" without "virtual", "augmented", "mixed", "alternat[iv]e", though with some other modifier ("extended", "enhanced", "hybrid", etc.). These uncommon terms all seem to refer to AR/MR gear, but this is not going to be clear to people not intimately familiar with this stuff. I'm ignoring a case of "Reality Headset" as a brand name, and others hyperbolically named "Actual Reality Headsets" and "New Reality Headset. However, there are some potentially confusing trademarks out there, such as Cellet Reality Headset. The reality–virtuality continuum and the profusion of terminology like "extended reality", "enhanced reality", "hybrid reality", "visuo-haptic mixed reality", "computer-mediated reality", etc., etc., make for a lot of potential reader confusion. I.e., there's a lot of ambiguity in the "headset" case, just the left of "reality" instead of to the right of it in the "game" case.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  09:09, 26 March 2021 (UTC)