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

Sun Apr 27 04:15:24 UTC 2003

(Cut & paste from Mav's talk page, but of more general relevance.
Formatting will be funny because of the limitations of email, but it
should still be readable)

My former enthusiasm for doing fauna entries has evaporated. After
doing a bit of this and a bit of that, I was really enjoying working in
a field which is, if not controversy-free, at least one where the
controversies are very civilised. 

Consider the horrible mess that is bird taxonomy, with the English, the
Americans, the Australians, the Dutch, the South Africans all having
different and incompatible classifications. And yet, here on the
'pedia, we have two Englishmen, an American, and an Australian - all
happily cooperating to build a body of work that is as up-to-date and
scientifically correct as we can make it. It has a long, long way to
go, and there are several thorny issues to resolve, but bit by bit we
are getting there. 

Or consider the woeful state of the mammal entries. (I'm thinking of
the Australian ones in particular here.) I've spent days and days
working on these, checking all my facts with appropriate sources as I
go along, and they have started to take some form and accuracy on. 

All the while I've been swallowing, largely without complaint, the
constant and tedious fiddling from people who, however well-meaning,
are being very unhelpful. Yesterday I reached a "last straw" state of
mind and I've spat the dummy out. 

I don't want to do fauna stuff here anymore. 

I take your point about using common names instead of specialist names,
and agree with it. However, we need to think this through. Consider the
three basic situations: 

(i) Highly specialised and very formal publications that generally
avoid common names entirely. In these, if it appears at all, a common
name is more a textual decoration than an indication of a particular
precise species. Writers only use the commom name to do things like
avoid too much repetition in a sentence, and never use it to stand
alone as an identification of a species. The common name is, in effect,
used as a sort of psudo-pronoun. For example (just a made-up sentence
to illustrate):

A. australis is endemic to New Zealand, where it is classified as
vulnerable, but on neighboring islands the brown kiwi remains common.

Not a very good illustration, but the point is that the common name
serves no special purpose of identification (in these publications,
binomial names rule supreme) and does not need to be set off in any way
from the rest of the text. Hence, it can be left uncapitalised without
loss of meaning or clarity. (By the way, at least so far as birds go,
this style is very rare indeed.)

(ii) Scientifically correct publications more broadly. These can be
aimed at the general reader or the professional working in the field,
but usually fall somewhere between those extremes. Here, correct
capitalisation is a vital part of the use of common names. In at least
some fields (birds is certainly one), the common name is an exact
equivalent to the binomial name. There is only one Black-shouldered
Kite in the entire world. You can write "Elanis axillaris" or
"Black-shouldered Kite" and no-one has the slightest doubt which
creature you mean. However, a "black-shouldered kite" could equally
well be E. scriptus or any of several birds from the northern
hemisphere. Unless we include the binomial name each and every time we
want to indicate E. axillaris or E. scriptus (as the highly formal and
rather unreadable type of strictly-scientific publication listed at (i)
above does), we have no other choice but to use capitalisation.

(iii) General works which don't aim to be scientifically correct. Here,
there is no particular attempt to be accurate or precise, or (usually)
to identify any particular species. Often, neither the author not the
reader even knows what the species is, let alone cares. For example, if
I were writing a novel, it would be silly to write:

Gloria shuddered at the thought of her pet harming the beautiful
Scarlet Robin she had admired from the window earlier that morning.

You might as well go the whole hog and write:

Gloria shuddered at the thought of her pet harming the beautiful
Scarlet Robin (Petroica multicolor) she had admired from the window
earlier that morning.

In a novel or in a work of general non-fiction, it is perfectly
acceptible (and indeed correct) to not capitalise, as the intention of
the work is to highlight some thing other than the creature in
question. In the passage above, for example, we are not interested in
the robin, nor even in what Gloria's cat has done to it, we are
interested in Gloria's emotional reactions.

In summary, there are three possibilities: 

(a) That we always use binomial names if in the slightest doubt about
the identity of a species. This would be, strictly speaking, correct,
but unreadable for the vast majority.
(b) That we abandon the attempt to create a scientifically correct body
of work, and become a light-weight, non-auhoritive place that is little
more than a glorified chat room. (Not that there is anything wrong with
chat rooms, it's just not what I think Wikipedia ought to be. Nor you.)
(c) That we adopt the same solution as is used by the vast majority of
works that aim to be factual, comprehensive, scientific, and accessible
to the general reader too - i.e., we use the correct capitalisation for
species names.

I would be delighted to return to crafting factual, readable, accurate
entries about fauna of all kinds. I have greatly enjoyed doing that
over the last few months. But, fair dinkum, I have had a gutfull of
constant hit and run edits that do nothing but spoil the result of all
the effort I put in. I don't want to be unreasonable or petulant, but
let's face it, we all only work on articles because we enjoy doing it
and find it rewarding. I am no longer enjoying it, and it's no longer
rewarding. As I have documented elsewhere, everyone who is doing bird
entries on any significant scale has similar problems. It's not just
me. I just happen to be the one who has reached the end of his tether
first. 

Tony Wilson
(Tannin)