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

Sun Apr 27 01:13:35 UTC 2003

Tannin wrote:
>...[Kind words - thank you :-) ]...
>
>Bluntly, we, the people who actually WRITE the fauna 
>entries, are sick and tired of being buggerised about, for 
>no good reason, by people who do NOT contribute to them. 
>Over the last month or so there has been a massive 
>improvement to the bird sections in particular. There is a 
>huge amount more still to do, but the concentrated efforts of 
>three or four regular contributors is really starting to show 
>results. Please, if you don't want to help with this project, 
>at least stop interfering with it.

But I'm trying to do just that - help with the project and make sure that the 
project is consistent with the rest of the encyclopedia. I've helped Jim with 
the formatting of the great public domain pictures and helped him attribute 
the source of those images correctly on the image description pages. 

The taxobox tables that you are using I also helped develop (and in fact I'm 
more proud of these tables than the element tables). Readers are contributors 
in Wikipedia and I read a lot and contribute a bit here and a bit there. The 
goal is to make Wikipedia a cohesive whole and greater than the sum of its 
parts. 

In the big picture view it is more important for us to avoid the use of 
specialized grammar rules and concentrate on general rules - rules known, 
used and expected by our general English-speaking audience and are used by 
other general reference works (encyclopedias, dictionaries, and most 
textbooks).

Thus common nouns (those that tell the "kind" of something) are not 
capitalized but proper nouns (those that name a singular, specific person, 
place or thing) are capitalized. Anything other than that complicates 
matters.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)