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

Sat Apr 26 10:01:25 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: 

You mean a specialized publication that only covers birds. Pick up a 
dictionary or another encyclopedia and you'll see those species names in the 
lower case. As I have stated many times before ; specialists /almost always/ 
overcapitalize the terms they use but Wikipedia is not a specialist 
publication. Also Ortolan has pointed out that style guides on this issue 
state that when there is significant doubt in these matters we should use the 
"downstyle."

>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.

Perhaps I was rash when I changed:

 Unless the term you wish to create a page
 for is a proper noun, do not capitalize second 
 and subsequent words

To your quote of the current convention (Hm - I could revert myself since I 
didn't make that edit based on any consensus...). Nah - the caveat is a good 
one but "almost always" to me means way more than a simple majority of usage. 
I usually think of that term meaning "greater than 90%" of usage. I've 
already stated that these terms are /very often/ not capitalized outside of 
specialized publications.  

>We, the people WHO ACTUALLY WRITE THE ENTRIES 
>have had a gut full of it. Please stop before the real contributors 
>in this area get sick of the whole damn thing and take their 
>effort elswhere.

Nobody wants that but at the same time we cannot add spurious capitalization 
to articles Or Else Sentences Begin To Look Very Odd When They Are Wikified - 
not to mention grammatically wrong and inconsistent with longstanding 
Wikipedia naming conventions.

Hopefully this will clarify the distinction between common and proper nouns:

Common noun (Gram.), the name of any one of a class of
      objects, as distinguished from a proper noun (the name of
      a particular person or thing).

 Proper noun (Gram.), a
      name belonging to an individual, by which it is
      distinguished from others of the same class; -- opposed to
      common noun; as, John, Boston, America.
     n : a noun that denotes a particular thing; usually capitalized

So we are only dealing with common nouns here which means the default style is 
to /not/ capitalize unless the term is almost always capitalized for some 
reason.

It is true that the specialist bird authorities are an excellent source of 
information on this subject - but those bird publications are not a useful 
source of information on English grammar as it relates to our unique 
circumstances on Wikipedia or for encyclopedias in general for that matter. 

These experts are experts in their respective fields whose subjects in this 
particular case are birds, not grammar. So for our naming needs the 
references we should use are dictionaries, style/grammar guides and other 
encyclopedias. Encyclopedias have different naming conventions and needs than 
do specialized publications. BTW, just because the top transportation 
planners in the United States write Transit Village with caps does not mean 
that that capitalization is correct in our context.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)