Fred Bauder wrote:
One of the counter-intuitive things a new Wikipedian
has to adjust to is the
convention on capitalization of titles: Only the first word is capitalized
unless it is a proper noun. This is not natural as all words in a title are
conventionally capitalized. We do that so that links from within text do not
need to be capitalized.
In the case of species names we are now making an
exception, creating
another counter-intuitive requirement: in text all words in the name of a
species must be capitalized. Again in contradiction to expected usage.
Having adopted the convention that in titles all words in a species name are
capitalized we are now forced to have them capitalized in text in order that
links work.
Actually, the position of Tannin et al is that
it always was supposed to be capitalised in running text.
To capitalise the article title is merely a deduction from this;
the controversy is ultimately about what should appear in text.
But this question gains additional importance because of the effects
that it'll have on article titles.
-- Toby