Q. Dear CMOS, would you please clarify 8.191 in the following example? I understand that Wikipedia should be roman, because it was never available in print. I also understand that The Chicago Manual of Style Online should be in italics, because there are both print and online editions. However, in practice, I find myself with sentences like this, which look “wrong”: “Comparing Music Index and RILM Abstracts with Music Periodical Index for music education topics is challenging.” In this example, which is coming up a lot in a book chapter I’m writing, would you italicize all three? And then, for consistency, would you italicize all three even when they are not together?
A. When similar online references are grouped together like that, it’s a service to readers to treat them all the same. Normally that would mean using roman type, since the majority of websites have no printed counterpart, but if most of the website titles in your book are italic, you could go with that.