Pin Eight talk:Manual of Style/RFC 2119

Alternative words
How should the policy give guidance on the alternative words REQUIRED, SHALL, SHALL NOT, RECOMMENDED, NOT RECOMMENDED, and OPTIONAL? Does the RFC-compliant use of these need to be attempted at all? Eighty5cacao 17:13, 7 February 2012 (MST)
 * As I see it, the MOS page is just a summary of the RFC. The RFC describes the other key words and gives more detailed guidance, as I tried to point out with "most common". --Tepples 17:43, 7 February 2012 (MST)
 * Perhaps I need to rephrase myself: Is it worth the trouble for us to comply fully with RFC 2119, given that some of the wiki's scope is outside the fields of study which RFC 2119 was designed to cover? Eighty5cacao 19:54, 7 February 2012 (MST)
 * Are you talking about the choice of whether or not a particular page needs these key words at all? I'll clarify that too. --Tepples 20:26, 7 February 2012 (MST)
 * Yes, I suppose your recent change is satisfactory. Eighty5cacao 21:02, 7 February 2012 (MST)

SHALL may be confusing
I suppose the other point I was getting at above was: SHALL (NOT) is defined as a synonym of MUST (NOT), but readers might confuse it with SHOULD (NOT) if they didn't first read the RFC or this page summarizing it. Should we discourage the use of SHALL (NOT)?

(IIRC, technically "should" is the past tense of "shall" &mdash; but modern English doesn't fuss about this in practice, and I digress.) --Eighty5cacao 09:51, 3 October 2012 (MST)
 * If it isn't listed in the "most common" section of what's this?, people will likely end up not getting the idea to try using it. So until it becomes a problem, let's not creep too fast. --Tepples 13:34, 3 October 2012 (MST)
 * Yeah, I kind of guessed that... Sorry for wasting (time|server space|insert other noun here). --Eighty5cacao 10:26, 5 October 2012 (MST)