Wiktionary talk:Votes/2016-12/Boldface in image captions

Rationale for avoiding boldface

Let use simple typography unless there is an overriding reason, and I do not see the overriding reason for headwords in image captions. While we boldface headwords in usage examples and attesting quotations, image captions are not really usage examples. Image captions are not very important, the images are. There does not seem to be any need to direct the caption reader attention to the location of the headword in the caption; captions are usually short, as they should be, and their visual scanning should be easy for the eyes.

Note: Avoiding boldface is the prevalent practice while a significant number of captions do use boldface, believing the following heuristic greps:

• grep "\[\[\(File\|Image\):" enwiktionary-20151102-pages-articles.xml|wc -l             → 45769 (All image captions)
• grep "\[\[\(File\|Image\):[^']*\]\]" enwiktionary-20151102-pages-articles.xml|wc -l    → 36597 (Image captions with no occurence of ')
• grep "\[\[\(File\|Image\):.*'''.*\]\]" enwiktionary-20151102-pages-articles.xml|wc -l     → 11184 (Image captions that contain at least one occurrence of ''' as a markup for boldface)

The numbers don't add up perfectly but they give an idea. They are for a somewhat old dump.

--Dan Polansky (talk) 15:07, 31 December 2016 (UTC)

The rationale sounds good to me. --Daniel Carrero (talk) 15:43, 31 December 2016 (UTC)

• For my part, I prefer captions that use boldface for the headword.

Of the 36,597 captions with no ' (single apostrophes), how many of those also don't contain the headword? ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 02:26, 7 January 2017 (UTC)