Cunc wrote: I endorse this general concept fully. Editing wikipedia should be relaxing and enjoyable, and we should all cut each other a major amount of slack. I'm a little baffled as to why this topic has turned into such a perennial dispute. I respect and admire the parties on both sides of the debate, and I most sincerely hope that they will reach a relaxing compromise soon. It is certainly true that we have had virtually no disputes about American/British spelling. I'm not sure that this precedent is assurance of the same thing happening with the Bird/bird issue, though. Suppose someone got excited about American/British spelling issues and started editing dozens and dozens of articles to "fix" it. Would everyone else just relax and let them have their way? Or would we start to have other people doing what _they_ see fit and reverting them. In practice, our social custom is something like "mild deference to the article as written". That is, if we come across an American/British spelling that seems odd to us, we generally just relax and let it go. We generally respect the wishes of whoever wrote the article first, although I suppose a change or two here or there goes unnoticed and without controversy. That seems like the best policy here, too. If people want to write with capitalization, let them. If they want to write without capitalization, let them do that, too. If there are inconsistencies, that's a bad thing, but not nearly as bad as having good people at each other's throats over something so minor. Today somewhere in the world there is someone who wants to learn about birds. That person might someday become a great scientist who will do something very useful with the knowledge originally obtained from wikipedia. We should put every tool in their hands to do that, which means: more content. It's sad to think of the hours wasted on capitalization debates, when there's still so much work to be done. --Jimbo

Stan Shebs wrote: Thus we accomodate both. Imposing English official names for species, would lead to riots in other capitals. These other languages have their own common names, and their own capitalization rules. Imposing American English on the British Museum sounds easier. The Linnaean names are not nonsense words. Even if the principle of English official names could be accepted it would give rise to an enormous number of bureaucratic committees to study and establish the "correct" names for every imaginable life form. That's not exactly a situation to please those who don't care for extra work. This sounds like an argument in favour of the Tyranny of the Majority. (See de Tocqueville) I have not reviewed the facts about ''Cynocephalus'' but I have no reason to doubt them. I suspect that this sort of thing will continue to happen in whatever language may be chosen. Using English names as an official standard is not likely to save us. I tend to lay the modern blame on the cladists who have revised taxonomy into a series of counter-intuitive groupings based on DNA evolutionary research. The average birder does not have the means at his disposal to sort them out that way.. As an example of equal confusion in English names take the genus ''Anas''; it includes ducks, teals, the gadwall, widigeons, the mallard, pintails, the garganey, and shovellers. On top of that there are 17 other genera in the Anseriformes that include ducks. Are we any better off with the English? We also need to take into account the contrary trend among grammar stylists to downstyle capitalization. In the course of developing my position in the present debate I encountered at least one book that considers completely downstyled titles as perfectly correct with only the first letter in the title being capitalized; another recognizes it as perfectly correct to use lower case for pronouns that refer to the deity. A new edition of the ''Chicago manual of style" is due to come out in August; I'm anxious to see what it has to say about its own name. Eclecticology