[WikiEN-l] A plea for sanity in capitalisation from the coalface

Sat Apr 26 10:15:13 UTC 2003

Tannin wrote:

> Over and over again, a small number of good, decent Wikipedia
> contributors are causing difficulties for those of us who are actually
> doing the hard yards in the fauna articles. All the major contributors
> to the bird entries, for example, have complained about this on the
> talk pages, but nothing is ever done. People keep claiming that, for
> example, the Common Raven should be written as "common raven". One need
> only reach to the bookshelf and pick up a reference work to discover
> that this just ain't so. All we ask is that we follow our own naming
> convention:
>
> I quote: "Unless the term you wish to create a page for is a proper
> noun OR IS OTHERWISE ALMOST ALWAYS CAPITALISED." Species names for the
> higher orders (and possibly the lower ones too) are indeed "almost
> always capitalised" and rightly so, as to do anything else is to court
> ambiguity and lose clarity.

I'm in agreement here.  One of my own areas of interest, dog breeds, has a
similar issue.  So far the capitalised versions have (mostly) held here, but
it would be nice to clarify the issue and be sure of a consensus.

In the case of dog breeds, all my books on the subject (five) capitalise, as
do the various kennel clubs.  I've been careful to check in each case - it's
"Airedale Terrier" but "Maltese terrier" for example.  I would like to move
"Chesapeake Bay retriever" back to "Chesapeake Bay Retriever" to follow this
principle.

Regards,

sannse