[Foundation-l] Re: Personal research grant collaboration request

Sat Jul 31 07:15:22 UTC 2004

Chitu Okoli wrote:

>By the way, off topic grammatical note on "Wikipedia" (capitalized) vs.
>"wikipedia" (small letters): I understand that the standard English rule for
>capitalizing things like this (I don't know how this works in other
>languages) is that when you are referring to something of which there are
>many instances, you should use small letters. However, if there is only one
>such sample in the whole world/universe, you should capitalize it. For
>instance, website uses small letters because there are millions of them, but
>the Web is capitalized because there's only one World Wide Web. The Sun
>should be capitalized (though it often is not, in practice) when referring
>to [[Sol]], the star of the Solar System, but sun should be left in small
>letters when referring to any generic star in any generic solar system.
>  
>
That's generally only the case with generic names like "website", not 
with brand names.  For example, the Coca Cola company makes many 
products which one would collectively refer to as "lots of different 
types of Cokes", not as "lots of different types of cokes".

For what it's worth, I don't think it's necessary to capitalize 
single-instance things either if they're fairly common and not proper 
names.  I certainly rarely see "Web" capitalized these days, and doing 
so looks a little bit mid-1990s (sort of like hyphenating "e-mail").

(But this is mostly a matter of opinion and taste, really, regardless of 
what the style-guide-du-jour tries to claim is "correct".)

-Mark