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This is a not-yet-complete Wikipedia discussion history of the lower- vs. upper-casing of vernacular names of organisms, and how to disambiguate them. Data goes back to 2003, though I started this log in late 2014 (based on an external text file I was maintaining since at least 2012). Since early 2015, the focus has shifted from species to breeds; the breed material has been moved higher up toward the top.

Overview: The bare fact of the matter is that a lot of people just habitually capitalize things that are important to them, while others, from all walks of wiki-life, feel that this is jarring and distracting to the average reader, and may even be seen as puerile and questionably literate (because the rationale for it isn't known to anyone but specialists in particular subdisciplines – such attempt to come of as "hyper-academic" actually backfire badly in a general encyclopedia). This is an entirely non-trivial usability and public relations issue for Wikipedia. That said, there are actually some at least fairly strong arguments in favor of the capitalization of the names of formal breeds (and cultivars) that are not arguments that pertain to species. A different but related issue is the penchant for fanciers of particular types of animals to resist natural disambiguation and insist on parenthetic style, policy be damned. Finally, even species capitalization – in a handful of narrow specialities – has the pro argument for it that WP should do what the specialist sources do in any particular topic area. But as one editor summarized it, Wikipedia has to decide to whom it will look a bit ignorant: A small number of academics, or a very large number of everyone else. The answer is clear, especially when major academic journals will not permit the over-capitalization preferred by specialists in a couple of fields, even in articles about those fields. The breeds case is essentially the opposite; real breeds with published breed standards (not just diffuse landraces and breed "types") are much more broadly treated as proper names, although there are conflicting lower/upper-case patterns in various newspapers and dictionaries (and some style guides are even self-contradictory on the question).

The current (as of 2022) consensus, in a nutshell: MOS:LIFE codified what the community has arrived at after all these years of debate:

  • Do not capitalize the common (vernacular) names of species or any other grouping of organism, other parts of these terms that are proper names like "Grevy's" or "Sardinian", or which are beginning a sentence.
  • The exceptions are standardized animal breeds, and formal cultivars (and trade designations) of domesticated plants. These are treated as proper names.
  • Use natural disambiguation when possible.
  • For scientific names, follow standard Genus species subspecies (or Genus species var. variety) format, as found in reliable sources; see MOS:ORGANISMS for in-depth guidance.

Recent-ish discussions and actions (2015–)

Update needed?
  • Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Capital letters#Should dog breed names be capitalized? (October–November 2015)
  • Actual move requests are covered in a section for this below.
  • There appear to have been no attempts to re-capitalize the vernacular names of any species.
  • The cleanup operations to decapitalize them appear to be nearly complete. Various people have worked on this, both in moving articles, and in copyediting their content. SMcCandlish tracked down a lot of this in non-bird articles (due to continued personal attacks from WP:BIRDS participants), especially on rodents, primates, cetaceans, and felines. Other tackled the bird article. Flying insects in two groups (dragonflies and moths/butterflies), and some plants (especially the endemically British ones) are still capitalized in many places as of 2017.
  • Late 2014 to early 2015 saw a lot of discussion, renewed in late 2015, and especially in WP:RMs and for a bit at WT:RM, about capitalization and disambiguation of the names of standardized animal breeds (see #breeds, below), but there is not, as of October 2015, any proposal to either decapitalize breed names, nor any to change MOS to recommend capitalizing them, though the WT:MOSCAPS thread about dog breeds has suggested an RfC about the issue more generally could be finally in order. The uneasy status quo is that MOS:LIFE does not actually address breed names in particular. It does address groups of animals generally, and many view this as applying to breeds. SMcCandlish statement:

    As the principal author of that section's current wording, I can state that it was intentionally written to be broad enough to include breeds, and that the examples provided intentionally include domestic landraces, and domestic "types" or "breed groups", but do not include formal breeds. This is because there's an incidental WP:FAITACCOMPLI situation in which virtually all animal breed articles are already capitalized (and were before MOS addressed such matters), so deciding what should be done with them is liable to be a long, unhappy WP:RFC discussion. If consensus goes to lower-case breeds, the only MOS change needed is the inclusion of an example of that sort. If consensus goes to retain capitalization, the only MOS change needed is a statement that it does not apply to standardized breeds. I suspect (but do not advocate) that the latter will be the ultimate result, for reasons I go into in more depth at #breeds; the rationales for capitalizing breeds are different from and might be stronger than those for doing so with vernacular names of species.

  • The draft comprehensive guideline on biological nomenclature at MOS:ORGANISMS remains held up (for several years now) by WP's failure to resolve the "capitalize animal breeds or not?" question, and includes drafts of both a pro- and anti- capitalization section.

Capitalization (and disambiguation) of breeds and cultivars

The issues outlined below were largely resolved in January 2019 at Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)/Archive 150#RfC on capitalization of the names of standardized breeds, with resultant changes made to MOS:LIFE to call for the capitalization of standardized breeds and cultivars (but not breed groups/types, landraces, crossbreeds, hybrids, color variants within breeds, etc.).

The concerns raised on both sides of the "capitalization divide" are not all identical, for standardized breed and cultivar names, to those of species. The current WP:FAITACCOMPLI situation is that all of the breed article names (and many on landraces, which should definitely not be capitalized) have been capitalized by those who favor upper case. I've even helped make this consistent, because it's better to have 100% of them capitalized, for reader-experience consistency, than something like 93.2% of them capitalized, and because most of them had already been capitalized since before 2010. SMcCandlish note: I've remained essentially neutral on this matter (more like wavering back and forth as new rationales appear; see below) for over a decade on Wikipedia now, though I've used WP:RM to move some uncapitalized ones to capitalization to be WP:CONSISTENT, without really taking a stand on whether they really should have mostly been capitalized to begin with; I just observed that they mostly were.  —  SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  15:44, 15 November 2015 (UTC)

The debates (there are many more pages not added to the list below yet) about this style matter actually raise some different issues than those about capitalization of vernacular ("common") names of species, and need to be tracked and examined separately. Capitalization of common names of species is a peculiarity of some specialist publications in ornithology, certain narrow branches of entomology, and (apparently) some regional botany, but rejected outside those fields both in biological (zoological, botanical) specialist publications and in general-audience writing.

By contrast, capitalization of all of the following is near-universal in the respective specialist literature (except perhaps for lab strains):

  1. standardized breeds (not landraces, breed groups, or other informal domesticated animal classifications) of: as recognized by fancier and agricultural organizations. Thus, Golden Retriever but not retriever generally.
  2. Human-cultivated plant varieties – cultivars (including cultivated hybrids, and greges) – with formal, standardized names (e.g. the Granny Smith apple but not crab apples, a general categorization, and again, not landraces or other non-standardized cultigens)

This increased frequency of capitalization of breeds/cultivars in topical reliable sources may make the argument for capitalization in Wikipedia stronger, though by no means a settled matter yet, especially given that more mainstream, generalist publications (e.g. newspapers, other encyclopedias, dictionaries, non-specialist magazines and books) often do not capitalize them except where they contain a proper name. That said, general publications do capitalize them more frequently than they capitalize vernacular names of species (which is nearly never).

Capitalization pro and con

Shortcut

Some of the arguments against capitalizing species apply equally well to any standardized breeds and cultivars, except when it is a registered trademark or otherwise qualifies as a proper noun. But some of them do not, and there are additional arguments that pertain to domestic animal breeds (and plant cultivars, sometimes differently) that do not pertain to species' vernacular names.

In particular, the wide support for capitalization of the names of standardized botanical varieties, cultivars and hybrids in mainstream style guides, and increasing frequency in mainstream publications, could indicate that WP should consider capitalizing formal animal breeds, since the difference is just a matter of biological regnum. Most of them will be capitalized anyway because they're based on proper names (no one is going to write siamese), or often have names that are German, a language that always capitalizes nouns.

Capitalization of breeds, cultivars and varieties is subject sometimes to external conventions. How much WP wants to honor them really depends on how much they conflict with average, non-specialist readers' expectations. The existence of would-be standards outside WP is no guarantee of, or necessarily even a good argument for, Wikipedia adopting them, especially when there are competing variants.

Wikipedia policies and guidelines:

  • MOS:LIFE, since the WP:BREEDCAPSRFC in 2019, says to capitalize a standardized breed, following the style used in the breed standard; and WP:NCFAUNA agrees. Before that RfC, both guidelines, among other pages, did not directly address breeds but consistently could be interpreted as saying not to capitalize them, as part of the general class of things that are not proper names and are not overwhelmingly capitalized in external sources. But this interpretation was not having any known effect (most breeds were capitalized on Wikipedia), and in the 2008–2014 redrafting and normalization of these guidelines, breeds were omitted from mention on purpose, the matter being deferred for later consensus determination after the lower-casing of species names was completed and adjusted to. Nevertheless, some editors involved in drafting what is mostly still the extant language are quite certain that decapitalizing breed names was actually among the intended results; others feel the opposite about it. MOS:LIFE clearly does call for the lower-casing of both a) vernacular names of species and (and subspecies), and b) general terms for a type of organization. Until the results of the aforementioned RfC, it did not does not mention breeds or cultivars specifically (nor did its examples illustrate any, intentionally, though they included landraces and breed " types", which are nothing like standardized breeds and more like sub-subspecies). Breed and cultivar names are much more specific than even a subspecies epithet. They're also tied directly to human activity, and do not refer to wild populations of anything, by definition.
  • Draft MOS:ORGANISMS - An essentially completed guideline to unify scientific and vernacular style on Wikipedia. It's very in-depth (at least for an encyclopedia style guide), was several years in the making, and is the most intensively researched MoS page. It was long stuck in a half-finished draft state, presenting both the pro- and con-capitalization cases for breeds as of December 2018. Failure of WP to arrive at a consensus on this one style question was the main reason the guideline remained a {{ Draft proposal}} for so long (probably a Wikipedia record, for a page that is actually in use and followed, aside from that one disputed section). As of 2023, it still says draft on it for some reason.

Arguments for capitalization of English-language names of breeds and cultivars (under construction and open to further input):

  • Capitalization has already been applied to standardized breeds' names, site-wide. Undoing it now would be like a WP:MEATBOT action, and would not objectively improve the encyclopedia, just favor one form of consistency over another.
  • Virtually all specialist sources for/by breeders and fanciers capitalize breed names [though not always consistently with each other, especially after a hyphen].
  • A large proportion of breeds are capitalized no matter what (in English) because they are or include adjectival proper names ("Pekingese", "Australian", etc.); the comparatively small number that are not could be confusing (at least to editors) as exceptions.
  • A few breeds are proper names no matter what because they're trademarks (mostly in livestock and lab animals, but see also the Ragdoll cat).
  • A significant number [though a minority] of general-audience publications capitalize breed names even where they do not contain a proper name; the style is not jarring to readers, so it is not a specialized-style fallacy.
    • There's a comprehension issue: If I write "American shorthair cat" or "Lithuanian white pig", I could be talking about the breeds or about any cat in the US with short hair and any white pig from Lithuania. "American Shorthair cat" and "Lithuanian White pig" make it clear I mean the breeds.
  • Breeds/cultivars are a human creation, not naturally evolved ones, and thus are like works of art or models of automobile, and thus should be treated as proper names.
  • Standardized breeds are, in effect, publications (the standards themselves, issued by a breed registry or the like); at very least they're a special designation or title that is earned through proven pedigree and conformation. An argument can thus be made that they're proper names.
    • Standardized breeds are, by their nature, also directly comparable to awards of recognition to successful breeding programs. [This argument does not apply to landraces, historical breeds before the advent of breed standards, and other informal "breeds".] Two points in favor of this argument for standardized breeds are:
    • In some breed registries, an individual animal with a pedigree entirely within a breed may fail to qualify as member of the breed due to failing to fit the conformation specification in the standard.
    • In some registries, individual animals with no pedigree may be accepted as members of certain breeds based on nothing but visual conformation and geographical origin (e.g. a Manx cat either has a pedigree as one, or came from the Isle of Man and upon examination conforms to the standard).
  • Standardized breeds can also be analogized to fictional creations (like Hobbits and Wookies), since they're an arbitrary concept from the human mind not a description of nature. They are also similar to technical specifications, for the same reason. If the International System of Units can decide that the names and symbols of power units are watt (W), volt (V) and ampere (A), and ohm (Ω) – not "Watt", not "w", etc. (even though not all newswriters, etc., get it right); then thus stands to reason that breed federations can establish long and short names of breeds and how to capitalize in them. For breeds (as of horses) with names determined by national breed-specific clubs rather than international federations, they are akin to trademarks of particular companies.
  • Many breed names that do not include proper names are German, and in that language are always capitalized as as nouns or noun phrases; purists may thus object to lower-casing them in English, even for names assimilated into English.
  • Cultivars and trade designations – plant breeds – are uniformly capitalized in virtually all sources.
    • Animal breeds should receive the same consideration just for consistency, despite no uniform system of orthography for them in scientific literature. I.e., do not assume that our editors are nomenclature experts; just give them a simple rule to follow.
    • It is better to treat breeds and cultivars exactly the same way, despite any rationale differences for capitalizing one but not the other, because only experts are liable to know or even understand those differences, and the result would be reader-confusingly inconsistent.
    • Lower-casing animal breeds would inspire an attempt to lower-case cultivars, which would lead to an even worse dispute than that which surrounded lower-casing of species names.
  • Standardized breeds surely must be proper names, like "Europeans" and "the Weather Underground" because they uniquely name clearly identifiable groups. The scientific names of species, and the formal names of cultivars (plant breeds) are treated as proper names (with special formatting such as Homo sapiens and 'Granny Smith'); denying even capitalization to standardized breeds of livestock would be a WP:CONSISTENT problem, denying any form of proper naming to them.

Arguments against capitalization of English-language names of breeds and cultivars (under construction and open to further input):

  • WP:CONTENTAGE is an "argument to avoid" (and see also WP:FAITACCOMPLI). WP has plenty of times undone a site-wide decision because it was a bad idea (date auto-formatting and auto-linking, spoiler templates in plot summaries, species capitalization, etc.).
  • Non-specialist sources generally do not capitalize breed names except where they contain a proper name. [This majority is not as large as it is for non-specialist sources that do not capitalize species common names, however.] Specialized sources are more reliable for facts about a topic, but not for how to best write general-audience English about the topic.
  • There's no evidence readers are confused about breeds being in lower-case (aside from capitalized proper names), or newspapers and the like would not use lower-case. Rewrite to avoid ambiguous constructions, just as we do with species vernacular names. It is the "job" of WP editors to properly research what they are writing about, including the origin and meaning of its name.
    • There is no comprehension issue, unless one simply is a terrible writer. For any case in which "Lithuanian white pig" could be ambiguous, just write "the Lithuanian white pig breed", or the like. And "American shorthair" cannot be anything but a breed, since "shorthair" isn't a real word but only used in a breed names; a random cat with short hair is short-haired. "Lithuanian White" would not make it clear to readers one meant the breed, since using capitals this way is not a convention in everyday English; the average reader will not understand the special breeder-jargon "signification" capitals.
  • Breeds that are trademarks or placenames can be capitalized without extending that proper name privilege to all other breed names. This is exactly the same as with any other topic, and treating breeds differently is a specialized-style fallacy.
  • All human labels, including for genetic and phenotypic abstractions, are artificial, so the "human not natural" argument for capitals is baseless. There is thus no difference for WP style purposes between a species and a breed. Since we do not capitalize the English-language common names of species (or subspecies), we should not do so for breeds (whether we do or not for cultivars, due to an international standard; see below).
    • An analogy of standardized breeds to human awards is dubious, since many other such analogies can be made that do not argue for capitalization, e.g. that acceptance into a standardized breed is comparable to citizenship (it's not "I am a Citizen of Botswana" or "She is a Tongan National"), to occupation (wrong: "I am a Dental Hygienist", despite this requiring the award of a certification), to diagnosis ("He is on the Autism Spectrum" is wrong), etc. And no one is arguing against capitalization of the titles of breed standards documents in citations, which would be done per MOS:TITLES. Our articles are about the animals, not the paperwork.
    • Also, the fact that breeds are usually treated as something automatically a matter of pedigree tells us that the exceptions are simply unusual deviations for rare contexts, not that they are meaningful to our general question.
    • Breeds are generally not like fictional creations; most of them have names that simply indicate their origin or something else descriptive about them, and/or were already in use for a more general type of animal (often a localized landrace) before the establishment of a standardized breed with the same or a derived name. Breeds are not like technical standards because they are not broadly accepted worldwide with the same definitions, but subject to continual dispute from one organization to another as to what a breed's qualities are, what its name is, and whether it is even recognized as existing, while the stylistic conventions are generally ignored outside of breeds-specific writing. Breeds are not like trademarks (except in the rare cases where one actually is trademarked), because a trademark, like a patent, is a highly specific legal category for which only certain things (not most breeds) qualify.
  • Taxonomic ranks below subspecies are not formal in zoology, but certainly informally include breeds; we know this because a) zoological literature about domesticates often refers to breeds as such and by name; b) all breeds are within (or a hybrid between) species or subspecies which have been taxonomically and genetically identified; and c) in botany (particularly horticulture), the lower taxa are formally catalogued, including forms, varieties, and cultivars, the last of which is synonymous with domestic plant breeds (some botanical literature does in fact refer to cultivars as breeds, and cultivar itself is a comparatively recent neologism).
    • Thus, any rule WP adopts (like do not capitalize) that applies to taxa below genus applies to breeds, except the specific consensus to honor the ICNCP's standard to capitalize plant cultivars (and put them in single quotes) in a scientific name (example, for an apple cultivar: Malus pumila 'Red Delicious'). That still excludes animal breeds.
    • A near-universal convention for capitalization of horticultural cultivars in formal horticultural nomenclature – but only under their "official" ICNCP cultivar names, not every vernacular name – does not generalize to a convention to always capitalize them outside that context, thus also could not logically lead us to capitalize all similar things, including domestic animal breeds.
    • Breeds are not taxa under the ICZN (or other) nomenclature. There is no external international standard for capitalization of their names.
  • Capitalization of all breed names leads to incorrect capitalization of foreign-language words and phrases in the names of breeds, in languages that do not capitalize this way; see, e.g., a large number of entries at List of chicken breeds. MOS (at MOS:TITLES, etc.) is clear that we should not impose English capitalization rules on names in other languages. [For noun-capitalizing German, a stronger anti-caps argument is that MOS:CAPS says not to capitalize unless necessary, and since English sources are not consistent about capitalizing German-derived breeds, WP should not do it. I.e., English reliable sources trump defaulting to German style; see also WP:NCCAPS#Capitalization of expressions borrowed from other languages, with a similar example about Art Nouveau vs. French art nouveau.]
  • Breeds are not proper names, any more than "mountain lion", "chief operating officers in the Australian banking industry", and "indigenous peoples of the Americas" are proper names, despite referring to clearly identifiable, unique groups. They're common-noun classifications and labels. (This would not lead to cultivars being lower-cased in scientific names, where a 'Cultivar Name'-formatted name is a symbol in a formally standardized construction, like the orthography of measurement units or chemical symbols in other technical material.)

Neutral observations about capitalization of English-language names of breeds and cultivars (under construction and open to further input):

  • Simultaneously, some regulars at WT:MOS and WT:AT have suggested that some participants in various livestock- and pet-related wikiprojects have been operating a WP:LOCALCONSENSUS against the gist of the site-wide MOS:LIFE, WP:NCCAPS, and WP:NCFAUNA guidelines, while some of the wikiproject-focused editors have accused MoS/AT/NC editors of themselves just being a local-consensus WP:CABAL. Both of these arguments essentially cancel each other out, in theory, though WP:CONLEVEL policy favors the interpretation of the MOS/AT side; Wikipedia WP:P&G pages are much more watchlisted and receive much broader input than micro-topical wikiprojects. A well advertised, site-wide RfC can settle the matter with no "consensus level" problems, and the ill will inherent in the mutually accusatory approach is unhelpful.
  • Proponents of capitalization insist that breed and cultivar names (and species names for that matter) are in fact proper names, and that any disagreement with this idea is absurd. Proponents of lower-casing are certain that capitalizers are absurdly failing to understand the linguistic and philosophical meanings of "proper name". Both of these competing ad hominem claims of the other side's ridiculousness add nothing to the discussion. That said, proponents of the proper name theory have gotten nearly no traction in this or the closely related species common name capitalization debate, and even fans of capitalization in the latter rejected this argument, preferring to simply base support for capitalizing species names on alleged standards (an argument that ultimately failed, in WP:BIRDCON, because the world has not in fact adopted the IoC naming scheme as a standard, and even if they had it would apply only to a single clade, the birds, presenting an intolerable WP:CONSISTENT problem for Wikipedia).
  • This may simply come down to whether the large percentage of a large number of general-audience sources that do not capitalize counts out to a greater number than the combination of the large percentage of a small number of specialist sources that do plus the small percentage of a large number of general-audience sources that do.

Some previous discussions of breed capitalization

Shortcut
See further down for disambiguation debates.
You may be looking for WP:BREEDCAPSRFC ( Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)/Archive 150#RfC on capitalization of the names of standardized breeds).

External sources on breeds and capitalization

  • The editors of the MLA Handbook give inconsistent advice [1]. While it leans lower-case by default except for proper names (examples provided: French bulldog, German shepherd, Irish setter, Portuguese water dog, Airedale terrier, Akita, Brittany spaniel, Labrador retriever, Lhasa apso, Doberman pinscher, Gordon setter, Jack Russell terrier, Maine coon, Texas longhorn), it then unaccountably tacks on this: "Yet other breed names are capitalized according to convention and for clarity: Old English sheepdog, Shiba Inu", which is confused and meaningless. There is no difference at all between the constructions "Shiba inu" and "Lhasa apso" (placename followed by generic non-English term for 'dog'). While "Old English" is another name for the language Anglo-Saxon, that is not the meaning here; the old English sheepdog is has nothing to do with pre-medieval English and is simply an old breed of English sheepdog. Worse, the "convention" among people who focus on breeds is in fact to capitalize all of them, always. Then MLA material ends with a recommendation to just do what dictionaries do, but we see below that dictionaries uniformly – virtually without exception – lower-case these phrases except where a proper name (or adjective derived from one) occurs. So, MLA is veering from "don't capitalize" to "maybe capitalize, inconsistently and for contradictory reasons", to "don't capitalize".
  • Daily Writing Tips [2] (a blog that is popular but of dubious reliability) addresses plant cultivars but not animal breeds: "An exception [to the general rule to lower-case all non-scientific names of organisms] is also made [in addition to that for proper names] for references to types of fruits and vegetables, such as Red Delicious apples or Early Girl tomatoes. Then there are names of cultivars, or cultivated varieties, of plants, such as that of a kind of broccoli, Brassica oleracea ‘Calabrese’. The convention in botany is to enclose the name of the cultivar in single quotation marks." This is slightly confused, because Red Delicious and Early Girl are in fact cultivar names; what's happened is that the writers didn't realize that the single-quotes convention only applies to extended scientific names, not general prose (and they didn't get the scientific name styled correctly anyway, as it should have the genus and species italicized: Brassica oleracea 'Calabrese'), and thus mistook Red Delicious for some other kind of "type" than a cultivar.
  • "English Style Guide: A handbook for authors and translators in the European Commission" (7th Ed., 2011): Gives the same advice, more correctly, with example "Camellia japonica 'Ballet Dancer'"; basically, they're just saying "do what ICNCP does".
  • "8.129 Horticultural cultivars". The Chicago Manual of Style (16th [online] ed.). U. of Chicago Pr. 2010.: Confused. Gives the same advice on plant cultivars (with examples of forms like "a Queen of the Market aster" and "cape fuchsia (Phygelius 'Salmon Leap')". Sadly it is totally useless with regard to animals at "8.128 Domestic animals and horticultural categories", as it relies upon faulty logic (by citing authorities that have nothing to do with the topic, only scientific names), and directly contradicts itself, giving both "Rhode Island Red" and "Maine coon" as examples (these must either be "Rhode Island red" and "Maine coon", or "Rhode Island Red" and "Maine Coon"; both are standardized breeds, and in precisely the same proper-name common-noun format). The "authority" they cite, the ICZN, has nothing to do with domestic animal breeds at all.
  • "U.S. Pet (Dog & Cat) Population Factsheet" (PDF). The American Humane Association (AHA). 2012. Retrieved 2013-12-17.: Doesn't capitalize. Note also use of "German shepherd dog" - very clear about perceived necessity of disambiguation. However, this is just a brochure, and may not represent how all of their material is written.
  • The Guardian and Observer Style Guide does not capitalize breed names except where they contain a proper name. See, e.g., first entry, "dachshund" in the "D" section [3].
  • Dictionaries use lower-case. Search on German shepherd, one of the most potentially ambiguous breed names (seems to refer to human sheep-herders from Germany if you don't know breed names):
    • Random House Unabridged (US) and Collins (UK), via Dictionary.com, give "German shepherd" or "German shepherd dog" (RH), and "German shepherd" (Collins) [4]
    • Merriam-Webster (US) gives "German shepherd" [5]
    • American Heritage (US) gives "German shepherd" [6]
    • Oxford (UK) gives "German shepherd" [7]
    • Cambridge (UK/US) gives "German shepherd" [8]
    • Random House (US), via TheFreeDictionary.com (also repeats AH and Collins entries) has "German shepherd" [9]
    • All major dictionaries of the English language lower-case breed names except where they contain a proper name. This can be confirmed further with the OneLook.com dictionary meta search, using additional very common multi-word breed names (it also includes hits from encyclopedias, when possible, including Encyclpaedia Britannica and Encarta): [10], [11], [12] (one capitalized hit, in Encarta encyclopedia), [13] (ditto), [14], [15], [16], [17], [18], [19], [20] (one capitalized hit in the non-notable "Infoplease Dictionary"), [21], [22], and so on. In trying various searches that produced results in most dictionaries, the only aberrant result was for Maine Coon [23], which showed two British dictionaries using "Maine Coon", apparently from lack of familiarity with coon as an American colloquial abbreviation of raccoon.
  • Google nGrams, crafted to avoid titles, headings and the beginnings of sentences [Note: These should be re-run and compared, if the corpus databases today include material newer than 2008, which they still do not as of 2018-08.]:
    • German Shepherd vs. German shepherd: Lower case preferred by 2:1 to 3.3:1 ratio. [24] [25] [26] [27] [28]
    • Golden Retriever vs. golden retriever: Lower case preferred by a 2:1 to 4:1 ratio, other than an odd capitalization spike around 1998, according to some of the data. [29] [30] [31] [32] [33]
    • Maine Coon vs. Maine coon: Upper case preferred by a 1.1:1 to 3:1 ratio, other than a pro-lower-case reversal in the 1990s according to some of the data [34] [35] [36] [37]
  • When isolating breed names with made-up (hyper-compounded) words in them, capitalization is more common:
    • "American Shorthair" is more common than American shorthair by a widely variable margin (some years as high as 7:1 but more recently narrowing to 2:1). [38] [39]
    • "British shorthair": no hits in Google's book data. [40] [41], despite the British Shorthair being the most popular cat breed in the UK.
    • Similar but less marked results for "Japanese Bobtail" over "Japanese bobtail", again narrowing to a much closer margin in recent years: [42]
  • When the names are capitalized, Ngrams including animal type following breed name show that the type is generally only capitalized when it is required for ambiguity reasons in the name:
    • "Norwegian Forest Cat" dwarfs "Norwegian Forest cat" [43] (but see "Norwegian forest cat", below). Rare breeds like this are hardly ever mentioned except in specialist literature, which uniformly capitalizes, so this does not actually tell us anything about mainstream usage. It does tell us that the animal type is formally part of the name where it is required to avoid high levels of ambiguity (the animal is a cat, not a Scandinavian woodland). This is borne out by looking at standards themselves; both the Norwegian Forest Cat and the American Quarter Horse (which is not a coin) have those as their formal, standardized name, despite the fact that the Siamese cat, Holsteiner horse, etc., etc., do not contain "Cat" or "Horse" in their names (WP just includes them where necessary as disambiguation).
    • "Manx Cat" doesn't occur at all in recent books. [44]
    • Same goes for "Alsatian Dog". [45]
    • "Siamese Cat" is also almost unheard of: [46]
  • Highly ambiguous names tend to be capitalized more often, but this is not even a predictable effect:
    • "American Quarter Horse" beats out "American quarter horse" by a 3:1 to 9:1 margin depending on year. [47]
    • Norwegian Forest cat vs. Norwegian forest cat: Lower case preferred by a widely variable margin, and a late-1990s spike in preference of upper case [48], which coincides with the launch of several additional cat-fancier magazines, part of the sharp increase in specialty pet publications in this era (which could at least theoretically influence mainstream news publishing, and clearly do influence online publishing in the topic area).
  • Some other points of interest:
    • German [S|s]hepherd dog vs. Alsatian dog: The GSD forms (when combined) have outpaced the AD form, but it has had periods of dominance (ca. 1925–40, 1950–60, and a blip around 1968–9) [49]. Results on ambiguous phrases like "German shepherd" and "Alsatian" alone are iffy. However, the low level of ambiguity of "German [S|s]hepherd" (how often do Deutsche sheep-herders get written about?) vs. "Alsatian" probably means that "German [S|s]hepherd" with or without "dog" has actually been dominant over "Alsatian" since ca. 1939 [50].
    • There does seem to be slight tendency to capitalize the German breed names in English, influenced by the capitalize-all-nouns rule in the German language, but it's not consistent or strong. E.g. "Doberman[n] Pinscher" has lost its lead over "Doberman[n] pinscher" (the first part is a proper noun, and correctly spelled Dobermann, and often used without "pinscher", so "dobermann pinscher" and "doberman pinscher" are wrong), and the both-words-capitalized version had been the minority usage at times, including as recently as ca. 1990 [51]. Since around 2008, the both-capitalized and only-Doberman[n]-capitalized versions have been very close in frequency. The intentional misspelling "Doberman" was invented by the American Kennel Club and should be avoided except in a specifically AKC context. [I suppose one could view it like the difference between "Ockham" and "Occam" (as in William of, and his metaphoric razor), though without centuries of history to back the variant spellings. The inventor of this breed was a known person, who spelled his name Dobermann.]
    • Lower-case "dachshund" has always dwarfed "Dachshund", however [52] [53].
  • These (and similar searches on other German breed names) indicate two things: a) People are not actually confused by some breed names being capitalized as (or containing) proper names then others being lower case, since non-Germans generally have no idea whether "Dachs", etc., are proper names unless they've checked; b) the only confusion that seems to result is that when one part of a name is capitalized as a proper name, people aren't always sure whether to capitalize the rest of it, thus sometimes leaning toward "Doberman Pinscher" vs. "Doberman pinscher", even if they would normally write "dachshund". Professionally written sources generally seem to take the time to find out whether a German name element is a proper name or not, and do not blindly apply German noun capitalization to English usage of breed names, but they may continue capitalizing after they've started sometimes, out of uncertainty what to do with such a name. When no part of the name is a proper name, the capitalization is studiously avoided entirely [54], etc., even when part of the name could be suspected by someone who didn't check to be a proper name, as in "springer spaniel". [55] and "cocker spaniel" [56] (neither of these are the human surnames Springer and Cocker, but refer to the activities of the dog).
    • Capitalization of obscure breeds (Affenpinscher, etc.) is more common, when they show up in N grams at all, because most published references to them are in specialist (pro-capitalization) works, not general-audience ones. For better-known breeds, the exact opposite pattern is true. [57], [58], [59], [60], etc.
  • None of this means that the capitalization is entirely in specialist publications; a quick search of Google News (e.g. for "cocker spaniel" [61]) disproves that, though lower case dominates, especially in newspapers. Still, as of 2015-11-15, one of the first-page results was a newspaper using "Cocker Spaniel".
  • The "keep capitalizing if the first part was capitalized" issue, curiously, does not appear to arise with species names, only breeds: [62], [63]
    • Capitalization rates increase if specialist literature tends to favor species capitalization, as in ornithological and British botanical publications, since a) many such specialized sources are indexed by Google nGrams, and b) their style has an effect when those works are used as sources for non-specialized material ("I'm just writing it the way the experts did"): [64]. Even so, the majority usage clearly remains lower-case.
    • The same "breeds are somehow different on this matter" effect is also seen in other constructions. One might expect an aggrandizing and potentially ambiguous name in the form "[g/G]reat s/Something" to show a strong shift toward capitalization (e.g. through the influence of "Great Britain", etc.), but this only happens with breeds, including very popular ones that are frequently written about in non-specialized works, when compared to wild species about which there is also notable public interest that verges on fandom: [65]

Natural disambiguation pro and con

Wikipedia policies and guidelines

Arguments for natural disambiguation (under construction and open to further input)

  • WP:NATURALDIS policy (part of WP:Article titles directs us to prefer natural disambiguation over parenthetic, comma-separated, and descriptive disambiguation.
  • WP:COMMONNAME policy prefers that we use the common name, disambiguated if necessary, though an alternative name can be considered.
  • Even various opponents of the naturally disambiguated names have suggested that it really constitutes an alternative name not a disambiguation, but an alternative name would be permissible anyway, and this kind of alternative name happens to coincide with parenthetic disambiguation, so it is likely to be the best possible alternative name in most cases (possible exceptions would be rare, e.g. "Alsatian" for "German Shepherd", but also themselves usually need disambiguation).
  • The "Foo (species)" format is used almost entirely for notable individual animals (see many hundreds of articles categorized under Category:Individual horses, Category:Individual dogs; thus a name like Billy (dog) for a breed is itself ambiguous and confusing. A disambiguation that simply leads to another ambiguity is a failure.
  • WP:Requested moves consensus (see Some previous discussions of breed disambiguation) has consistently and overwhelmingly favored natural disambiguation.
  • Except in cases where the breed name already includes the species name or a synonym of it (e.g. -hound for dog), there are essentially zero cases in which a name of the form Breed Name species is not WP:RECOGNIZABLE and WP:PRECISE, even to breeders (in contexts where they need to clarify and the short form would be ambiguous). Some N grams [66]: Even "poodle dog" has been well-attested in print since the early 1800s, and "German shepherd dog" (more so than its alternative "Alsatian dog").

Arguments against natural disambiguation (under construction and open to further input)

  • Natural disambiguation often results in constructions that, while attested, are not the most common among specialists or even in general [Note: This is because the shorter, more common ones are ambiguous, so this is effectively circular reasoning, since it was the ambiguity that lead us to consider any form of disambiguation at all.]
  • Many breeds have an alternative name that can be used instead. [Note: This argument generally fails under WP:COMMONNAME policy, and often under WP:USEENGLISH since most of the alt. names are in other languages and rarely used, if at all, in English.]
  • If the common name is "Ragdoll" not "Ragdoll cat" (an alternative, longer name, not a disambiguation), we must use "Ragdoll" per WP:COMMONNAME then apply a parenthetical disambiguation, thus "Ragdoll (cat)". [Note: This is faulty wikilawyering, factually wrong in several ways. It is perfectly permissible under WP:AT to use a common-enough alternative name if the most common one is ambiguous; we consider this before even applying WP:AT#DAB disambiguation rules. When we do get to those, there is no requirement to use parenthetical; it is only one of several approaches, and the policy-preferred one is natural disambiguation, which is, necessarily, what "Ragdoll cat" is.]

Neutral observations about capitalization of English-language names of breeds and cultivars (under construction and open to further input)

  • Some of the more vocal participants in one wikiproject, WP:DOGS, have suggested they have a legitimate WP:LOCALCONSENSUS there to use parenthetic disambiguation for dog breeds, despite WP:NATURAL policy and WP:DAB guideline. [Note: An examination of its talk page archives turns up no such consensus discussion, only some complaints about whether some articles should have been moved without the project's input, and the LOCALCONSENSUS (a.k.a. WP:CONLEVEL) policy makes it clear that wikiprojects cannot make up rules that contradict site-wide policy, so this argument would appear to be moot.]
  • At the same time, some of these same wikiproject people have accused AT/DAB/NC editors of themselves just being an illegitimate local-consensus WP:CABAL. Both of these arguments essentially cancel each other out, in theory, though WP:CONLEVEL policy favors the interpretation of the AT/DAB side. A well advertised, site-wide RfC can settle the matter with no "consensus level" problems (to the extent that a long series of RMs has not already settled it), and the ill will inherent in the mutually accusatory approach is unhelpful.
  • Natural disambiguation can produce poor results, if WP:CONCISE is not also followed, e.g. "American Game breed of chickens" when "American Game chicken" or (more conventionally for game poultry breeds) the present naturally disambiguated title " American Game fowl" will suffice.

Montanabw summed up the issue pretty well in January 2015, on distinguishing between Mustang horses and other things named "Mustang": "We have a[n article about the] Shetland pony, which within the pony world is commonly called a "Shetland", likewise, within the horse world, we have "Mustangs" "Arabians" "Hanoverians" and so on. Outside of the horse world, any rational person will clarify an " Arabian horse" or a " Hanoverian horse" so as to be clear where we are talking about a horse or not." [67]

Some previous discussions of breed disambiguation

Shortcut
These discussions follow a similar debate pattern on WP as those involving capitalization of breed and species common names. Lots of specialized-style fallacy and WP:IDONTLIKEIT stuff, versus WP:CONSISTENT, WP:NATURALDIS and other actual policy-based arguments.

Some previous discussions on breed names and WP:USEENGLISH

Incomplete; just started this section.

Some previous discussions of merging, deleting, or properly naming "pseudo-breeds"

Incomplete; just started this section

We've long had a problem with editors (many of whom really know better) intentionally conflating breeds, crossbreeds, hybrids, coat-color varieties, feral populations, and numerous other things all under the magical word " breed", as redefined by them on-the-fly to basically mean "anything I want to be a breed is a breed". This seem to be a mixture of promotionalism, an excuse to over-capitalize, fancruft, ignorance of WP:Notability or WP:No original research, and PoV-pushing (e.g. against or in favor of particular breeder organizations and their terms).

Capitalization of common names of species – an eight-year, site-wide dispute

Shortcut

BIRDCON – the RfC that brought it to a close

  • Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Archive 156#Bird common name decapitalisation ( WP:BIRDCON), 2014-04-06 – 2014-05-01, RfC closed by neutral admin accepted by both sides; closed in favor of lower case with detailed list of rationales for doing so. Began as a discussion of a proposal, which turned into a poorly structured but well-enough attended straw poll. It showed little support for capitalization, despite proven WP:MEATPUPPETtry; it lists a preponderance of reliable, general-audience sources being against the practice (for those who feel that MOS should rely on them rather than do what consensus agrees is best for the encyclopedia). This !vote reversal kind of says it all.

Post-RfC cleanup

Even as late as 2016, there are still, throughout Wikipedia, frequent cases of capitalization of the common names of species, including mammals.

  • In late 2014, SMcCandlish cleaned up a large number of cases of this, among both primates and felines, but only in a few genus and species articles. No telling how many more of them there are.
  • Examples like this rodent case are all over the place. Another, uncovered shortly after that one. A marsupial one turned up as recently as December 2016 [69].
  • As of early 2015, progress on decapitalization of vernacular names of birds was proceeding slowly, but with the labor of various editors, some MoS regulars, others just wikignomes. Some participants of WP:BIRDS were helping, most were not. The wikiproject's more vocal participants tended to be divided along two contradictory lines: harassing editors who had supported lower case for not doing all the cleanup work by themselves, and attacking the editors doing the cleanup work for actually doing it. Both basically amount to sour-grapes belligerence with regard to lower-casing. SMcCandlish noted: 'I don't like being berated, especially in a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" scenario, so I eventually bailed on the effort and went back to mammals. The WP:OWNers win again. [sigh].'
  • "Cat", "Domestic Cat", etc., found still capitalized at Lists of cats in August 2016. [70]
  • Template claiming "IOC World Bird Names ... is the de facto naming standard within the Wikiproject:Birds" was still appearing in about 30 articles; deleted at TfD in November 2018.

Prior state of policies and guidelines (up to April 2014)

This was a then-current record of disruption happening at WP:P&G pages and attempts to resolve and clean up.
  • WP:MOS#LIFE ( MOS:LIFE): Wikipedia:Manual of Style#Animals, plants, and other organisms – Old news: Since 2012 (based on earlier but less clear 2008 wording), it said plainly to not capitalize common names of organisms, but observed without endorsing it that there was a pro-caps "local consensus" conflict regarding birds; and to not apply the capitalization elsewhere. This was being miscast as a "birds exception" by WP:BIRDS, and in turn being used as an excuse to demand more "exceptions" for insects and plants.
  • MOS:CAPS: Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Capital letters#Animals, plants, and other organisms – Old news: Conflicted with MOS since 2012-01-05; was wishywashy, wrongly saying WP:BIRDS is an "exception" to MOS. It was largely cleaned up to agree with MOS:LIFE as of 2012-02-29. But as of 2014, it was severely out-of-line with MOS and flagged as disputed, especially for adding a new "exception" to capitalize some insect categories when there isn't even a consensus to do so at the projects in question.
  • WP:NCCAPS: Wikipedia:Naming conventions (capitalization)#Organisms – Old news: As of early 2014-04, NCCAPS grossly diverged from MOS:LIFE, and didn't even match WP:NCFAUNA and WP:NCFLORA; falsely promoted WP:BIRDS#Naming as a "guideline" (this was removed in mid 2014-04). All of these defects have been corrected, and it now simply links to the actual guidelines and very concisely and accurately summarizes them, as of 2014-04-15
  • WP:NCFAUNA: Wikipedia:Naming conventions (fauna)#Capitalisation and italicisation, with only 58 watchers [71] – Old news: Conflicted with MOS:LIFE as of 2012-01-05, saying projects could make exceptions, in contradiction of WP:LOCALCONSENSUS; largely cleaned up to agree with MOS:LIFE as of 2012-02-27; formerly part of WP:AT (then WP:NC), before split off; as of early 2014, it was modified without consensus to be favorable to bird capitalization, and this has been reverted as of 2014-04-04)
  • WP:NCFLORA: Wikipedia:Naming conventions (flora) – Old news: Conflicted with MOS:LIFE since 2012-01-05, saying there was no consensus for no-caps default, but there has in fact been one at MOS since at least 2008; many other problems. Analysis, much less fixing, not really begun in earnest. Subject to disputes as of 2014-04-05.

Manual of Style – relevant major changes

  • The present wording was put up on 2012-04-15. It is much less favorable toward WP:BIRDS than SMcCandlish's earlier draft, but represents consensus at that time, after a very protracted and heated debate (including blatant canvassing, poll disruption, false polling and dispute resolution sabotage by a WP:BIRDS member, detailed with links here. The wording is a "keep the peace" temporary compromise that pays a small amount of lip service to WP:BIRDS just to reduce strife enough that consensus becomes clearer eventually, to identify the WP:BIRDS practice as a WP:LOCALCONSENSUS problem not an exception, and to "wall off" their practice and keep it from spreading. Two years later, no one has made even the slightest headway toward gaining an actual consensus on Wikipedia to capitalize bird (or any other) species common names, and in fact the opposite has happened, e.g. with some WP:RM cases closing with consensus to move bird articles to lower case, long discussions on guideline pages in which pro-caps editors have a hard time defending their reasoning, etc. The game is over, but some of the players won't leave the field.
  • SMcCandlish's 2012-01-05 WP:BOLD attempt to resolve problems with that version; reverted (as expected), but led to a month-long discussion, and eventually, in April 2012, the current version of the MOS language, which is even less conciliatory toward WP:BIRDS ("oops")
  • A very problematic version existed for some time, in which MOS crazily deferred to a wikiproject advice page as if it were a policy. Basically, no one noticed or cared for a long time, until after objections in 2010 and 2011 did not resolve the matter, a broader discussion happened in 2012.
  • There was no consensus at all at MOS on the matter back in late 2006 to early 2007 (checking the timeline of the debate elsewhere, it's because WP:BIRDS members were actively proselytizing capitalization to other projects, with absurd results (e.g. various groups of mammal articles started getting capitalization despite this violating real-world nomenclature conventions for mammals)

2014 discussions on species capitalization

Previous Wikipedia-wide discussions

WP:Arbitration Committee cases

  • Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Article titles and capitalisation a.k.a. WP:ARBATC (Jan.–March 2012) – Was not about organisms, but concluded that WP:CONSENSUS demands a high standard for consensus to change policies and guidelines, and warned various parties for incivility and disruptive editing with regard to WP:AT/ WP:MOS matters.
  • Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration/Date delinking a.k.a. WP:RFAR/DDL (Jan.–June 2009; amended 2010, 2011) – Was not about organisms, but concluded against WP:FAITACCOMPLI actions to evade consensus by making it "too late" to do anything about one side's favored outcome; also establishes equal treatment of "gnoming" and other editorial contributions that aren't direct content creation; also establishes that it is not okay to revert-war between two styles that are both acceptable.
  • Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration#misapplication of WP:BIRD, only available in edit history (2–4 March 2008) – ArbCom declined to take the case, as a content dispute. An interesting read anyway; the party mostly responsible for trying to spread "birdcaps" to mammals and other articles got taken to ArbCom, and responses (on the capitalization question) varied between the views that a) it's an MoS issue to disxuss there, b) it's definitely not proper English, c) not sure, and d) it is proper English. Well, we all know how that went, ultimately. It's especially noteworthy that MOS:LIFE already, by this point, said to use lower case for species common names, but some people from one wikiproject were still editwarring to capitalize them, even for unrelated things like felines.

Wikiproject discussions, proposals, and essays

WP:WikiProject Tree of Life

WP:WikiProject Animals

  • Wikipedia:WikiProject Animals/Draft capitalization guidelines (1 September 2010 – 21 December 2011) and Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Animals/Draft capitalization guidelines (5 January 2011 – 5 January 2012, and some followup on 6 April 2014) – Crucial piece, demonstrating the confusion level of "our wikiproject is going to make up whatever it wants" chaos directly engendered by WP:NCCAPS saying they could do that. This was a failed proposal to establish essentially random wikiproject capitalization "rules", against MOS:LIFE's wording since 2008 (and superseded more explicitly by MOS:LIFE revisions in 2012, 2014). Even as late as 2011, virtually every biology project was inventing its own. One interesting part is that, despite most input being canvassed directly from wikiprojects, studiously avoiding notifying WT:MOS, WT:MOSCAPS, or WT:NCFAUNA and WT:NCFLORA, the idea of capitalizing flying insects did not gain consensus, despite later claims to the contrary (see the talk thread "Consensus seems to have been reached" for details, which in short were: capitalize birds and domestic breeds). This mess and its eventual rejection is incontrovertible evidence that the "MOS cannot be applied across the board or things will break" claim, trying to give WP:BIRDS a special exemption from 2008 to 2014, was nonsense and that the opposite was true. When MOS settled unequivocally on a single, lower-cased standard in April 2012, all of these projects (that were still active) fell in line with MOS on this, with no dispute, no editorial strikes and walkouts and other WP:DIVA crap, no reader and editor confusion, no canvassing and poll falsification and asking the other parent; no problems of any kind. All, that is, except WP:BIRDS.

WP:WikiProject Plants

WP:WikiProject Mammals

WP:WikiProject Amphibians and Reptiles

WP:WikiProject Birds

  • Birds in bird-related articles were mostly referred to by capitalized names, mostly following IOC's particular rules; but this is only because the wikiproject WP:OWNed them to stay this way, a constant "maintenance" effort, against the efforts of others editors to lower-case them.
  • Wikipedia:WikiProject Birds#Bird names and article titles ( WP:BIRDS#Naming) [ diff, 3 May 2014]: The wikiproject essay that was the principal source of all this strife. Advanced as a "guideline" by its proponents, it is really just wikiproject advice. It declared IOC the standard, and said to use capitalization (and not only for IOC names, but all common names of bird species). SMcCandlish helped overhaul this section, in a process that was unusually collaborative given the previous conflicts between that project and editor. The earlier version was a real mess. It later was changed to remove the capitalization stuff, after the WP:BIRDCON RfC.
  • Wikipedia:WikiProject Birds/References – Another wikiproject advice page on taxonomic and other references. Claims "the de facto standard for Wikipedia bird articles is the IOC World Bird List, (Currently version 5.2). This is preferred for all articles, although exceptions may be made in particular cases", but WP:COMMONNAME policy and the rest of the WP:CRITERIA for article titles of course trump this. In actual practice, the IOC names are usually converged on as the WP titles anyway, since most of the IOC's names are also the most common names used in reliable sources. It's unclear why WP:BIRDS insists on trying to declare they have a standard they can make other editors use, but it's probably best to cite WP:DGAF and forget about it. At this point, no one takes these "we have our own rules" assertions seriously. Still, it's frustrating to be a participant in this project yet have no ability to dissuade it from heavy-handed tactics like this.
2015
2014
This was a really busy year
  • Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Birds/Archive 67#Revisions and WP:BIRDCON 8 August 2014 – same anon as above attacks someone trying to comply with WP:BIRDCON as "destroy[ing] the work of others", and vents about "Cap Warriors".
  • Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Birds/Archive 67#WP Birds template as seen on talk pages 13 August 2014 – project member proposes WP:POINTy campaign to post protest messages on all the bird article talk pages. Another project participant wisely says "Let's not flog a dead horse."
  • Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Birds/Archive 67#Revisions and WP:BIRDCON October 2014 – Very interesting discussion, entirely among the bird regulars. Clearly indicates that several of them don't see it as a big deal, e.g. 'It's not really a matter of one way or other being "correct" (though we birders are certainly more used to uppercase names and the MOS boffins are more used to lowercase), it's just a matter of style. ... But we can all certainly adapt to whichever style is "acceptable" to the community.', with repeated calls to sticking to content creation instead of creating more strife. There is general agreement to try to reverse WP:BIRDCON at some point, amid some WP:GREATWRONGS-style ranting, that makes the same invalid arguments that have been refuted again and again whenever the issue comes up. The weirdest thing is this error: "Elsewhere [i.e., not style matters] in Wikipedia primary sources are the best choices for citations." That's not true at all, as even a cursory read of WP:RS makes clear. WP relies primarily on secondary sources, only permits "with caution" use of primary sources for certain kinds of things.
  • Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Birds/Archive 67#English name vs. Scientific name July 2014 – Some participants in that project still seem unclear that WP:COMMONNAME is a policy, not optional, and think that IOC's bird list is some Wikipedia standard to follow. Others point out that IOC's list isn't even as current as some others, and another suggests, about the specific cases at issue, that they scientific names are in fact the most common, so should be the names of the articles (which was the status quo with them; as of June 2015 one of the two is at the binomial, the other at the not-actually-common vernacular name.
  • WT:BIRDS and its archives newer than 61 have not been fully examined yet; some of the discussions listed immediately below may have already been archived.
  • Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Birds/Archive_67#Revisions and WP:BIRDCON 17 February 2014 – WP:BIRDS regulars confirm they're still active, despite some people quitting over the capitalization debate. Someone does not resist temptation to name-call those who disagreed with them "bullies", though a look through what is collected here so far indicates that the real browbeating has been coming, year after year, from this wikiproject, not from outside it.
  • Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Birds/Archive 66#Bird article name (capitalisation) March 2014 – Long series of discussions about the WP:RM at Talk:Crowned crane, that lead to a WP:MR, and eventually to the WP:BIRDCON RfC. Some valid procedural points were raised about the original RM, but these don't invalidate the later RfC. How we got to having an RfC (a long-running and very detailed one, with a very precise, well-reasoned close) is irrelevant. A consensus discussion can get started for any reason at all.
  • Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Birds/Archive 66#Bird common name decapitalisation May 2014 – Actual work to implement the changes approved at WP:BIRDCON demonstrated that, despite all the hair-pulling about capitalization of bird names being "correct", the WP:BIRDS project was not consistently applying the capitalization they were fighting so hard for. Even at a well-developed article like Red-tailed hawk, all of the following appeared in the middles of various sentences: Red-tailed Hawk, Red-Tailed Hawk, Red Tailed Hawk, red-tailed hawk, Red Tail Hawk, Red-tail, red-tail, Red-tailed, redtail. Among other errors and inconsistencies. So much for the fantasy story of evil-bad MOS style warriors destroying a great tradition of WP:BIRDS editors following a style rule that only idiots would defy. What WP:BIRDCON has actually done is actually result in normalization to something consistent, at all, of any kind, where before was random chaos.
  • Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Birds/Archive 66#IAR May 2014 – A bird editor says they simply will not comply with WP:BIRDCON. Someone else cites WP:POINT, etc., at them. WP:IAR actually allows you to write as you will, if complying with some nit-pick style rule interferes with your ability to get on with creating content. But IAR doesn't allow you to revert other people complying with MOS. Civil and productive discussion, actually, until someone hiding behind an IP address trips over Godwin's law and calls MOS editors "Grammer Nazis" (yes, they actually misspelled "grammar"), and says "Time to take the Bird Pages to a separate WIKI" (yes, they actually capitalized like that). Also, a self-contradictory view is given that it's wrong to have singled out birds and not also change style for some other categories, yet they must get on the warpath and make sure "MOS fanatics" can "impose their little power trips elsewhere on WP". Who's being fanatical again?
  • Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Birds/Archive 66#I'm out July 2014 – A bird editor says he's quitting over the decapitalization, and like so many other participants in this project before (for several years now) is sure that they all really need to jump ship to a better, bird-specific wiki because Wikipedia is a lost cause. That's a general condemnation of the project, not a disagreement over a style matter. This thread includes lots more false-accusation attacks from various parties (all against MOS editors): "Fundamental dogma", "jackboots approach" (see Godwin's law again), "harrassment of content editors", etc. The "resigned" editor actually still comes back regularly (as of June 2015) as an IP, just to post more personal attacks, which is just WP:TROLLing, an abuse of WP talk pages. Worst of all, someone posts a crazy conspiracy theory, that MOS editors (characterized as "some of the most zealous style-over-substance supporters" of course) "may well be long-term detractors of Wikipedia whose main aim is perhaps to destroy the long-term editor-base." Same editor also blatantly lies: "some of the main detractors [of the capitalization] are opposed to the fact that specialists contribute to Wikipedia."; and then continues with a second conspiracy theory about a "brigade" against "substantial authors" on some other trivial style point that some wikiproject wants to edit-war about. The sick thing is that the poster of all this wacky-attacky nonsense is an admin.
  • Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Birds/Archive 66#Southern boobook (Ninox boobook) June–July 2014 – Yet again, someone from this wikiproject says "We take the IOC world list as our standard." Well, Wikipedia takes WP:COMMONNAME policy as its standard. The names coincide anyway about 99.5% of the time, but that's not the point. This "we, the sovereign nation of WP:BIRDS, declare our own standard and ignore Wikipedia policy" nonsense has to stop.
  • Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Birds/Archive 66#So long, and thanks for all the fish (May–July 2014) – Someone who had already left Wikipedia about a year earlier heard about WP:BIRDCON and came back to announce (more civilly that the one above) some kind of re-resignation over the matter, but thought that the result was inevitable anyway. Despite being frequently held up by capitalizers as someone "driven off" the project by "style warriors", this editor a) had other reasons for leaving already, and b) has actually returned as of May 2015, anyway. The third in the Triumvirate Who Quit also resigns in this same thread, without any particular drama. Has sporadically returned, e.g. in October 2014 and February 2015. An unintentionally funny reference is made to tall poppy syndrome, as in "we're being cut down because others are jealous of our superior work", when it often has a very different meaning, relating to negative public reaction to "the affront committed by anyone who starts to put on superior airs". Best comment ever, after someone attacks people for making the changes (after earlier attacking them for not being willing to do the work to make the changes): "I don't care about capitalisation at all actually, I'm merely saving others from burning out on such a massive task. Do keep casting aspersions though." Exactly. It's not about writing content, or getting facts right, it's just about lashing out self-contradictorily at random because they didn't end up WP:WINNING a very WP:LAME fight they spent 8 or so years over-investing energy in. No wonder a few of them feel they need extended wikibreaks. Oh, and the same thread makes the false claim that a fourth editor quit, but he didn't; continued posting in that very thread, and has been active well into mid-2015.
  • Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Birds/Archive 66#Consensus July 2014 – Someone canvasses WP:BIRDS to come to ANI and complain about SMcCandlish personally, on totally unrelated issues. And of course a bunch of them did.
  • Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Birds/Archive 66#Bird names in lower case May–August 2014 – Well-reasoned comments by the WP:BIRDCON closing admin, and others, are met with the same scapegoating and personal attacks as usual, this time commingling entirely unrelated matters (me personally moving some articles without discussion that turned out to be controversial moves, vs. the community deciding in a very long RfC to not capitalize species names). It's completely irrational.
  • Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Birds#Locked Pages V (2nd req) ( diff) 2012-02 (regular editor of articles on Australian birds disagrees with imposition of IOC bird names, suggesting a lack of consensus on the issue; discussion continued at User talk:Bidgee#IOC Bird names)
  • Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Birds/Archive 65#Capitalisation issues again 2 March 2014 – Revert-warring to force upper case, and insistence that their WP:PROJPAGE at WP:BIRDS#Naming is a "guideline".
  • Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Birds/Archive 65##Move discussion about bird species name (capitalization, hyphenation) 12 March 2014 – Notification of the WP:RM discussion at Talk:Crowned crane. This is the turning point. The "we know better than you rubes" attitude the WP:BIRDS people brought to this RM and the WP:MR that followed it, and so on, contributed strongly to the community rejecting their arguments and concluding to downcase bird species common names two months later in WP:BIRDCON.
  • Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Birds/Archive 65#Question on common name capitalization April 2014 – insisting on capitalizing non-IOC names undermines WP:BIRDS' basis/excuse for the IOC capitalization, which is that "IOC is a special and different case"; this argument was ignored. A month later they all got lower-cased. Interesting. It was not the main deciding factor, but it sure didn't help. Lesson: Do not ignore the logic in an argument because you've had previous disagreements with, or just don't like, the person making it.
2012–2013
Another very busy period. Hint: When this many editors dispute a "rule" this much, it does not have consensus.
2011 and earlier

WP:WikiProject Cephalopods

WP:WikiProject Cetaceans

WP:WikiProject Fishes

WP:WikiProject Monotremes and Marsupials

WP:WikiProject Primates

WP:WikiProject Rodents

  • [Rodents are all now referred to by lower case names, unless some capitalization has been missed in article text.]
  • Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Rodents/Archive 1#Capitalisation (17 January – 13 February 2010, followup 30 January 2011) – Concluded (independently of MOS:LIFE) to use lower case, because the journal and other professional literature on rodents usually does so.

Article- and user-level discussions of note

Only a very small percentage of these debates have been identified and listed here yet. Some may have moved to talk archive pages.

External sources on species

Nomeclature codes, standards, and sciences-wide guidelines

  • The International Code of Nomenclature for algae, fungi, and plants. Intl. Botanical Congress, Intl. Assn. for Plant Taxonomy. 2011. "Preface". (formerly Intl. Code of Botanical Nom.): "[T]ypography is a matter of editorial style and tradition not of nomenclature." Doesn't cover animals, of course, but this is a general statement about style in nomenclature, not a statement about plants in particular.
  • International Code of Zoological Nomenclature – does not use the capitalization and does not recommend for or against it.
  • [Need to add IOC World Bird List on capitalization]
  • IOC World Bird List, "Patronyms and Accents" ver 4.1, access date 14 April 2014 – clear proof that IOC does what it thinks is most convenient for its audience. This is section is a crucial window into how IOC operates and why its style rules cannot be adopted here: The IOC's rationales given for dropping diacritics (what it incorrectly calls "accent marks") have already been thoroughly rejected at WP:DIACRITICS and MOS:DIACRITICS. They're also based on linguistic claims that are absurdly false, e.g. "correct pronunciation [is] the sole purpose of using accents in local languages of the world".

N-grams Care must be taken to eliminate as much as possible any usages where capitalization is done for formatting reasons, e.g. in titles and in headings. The main way to do this is to search for phrases with lower-case but trivial words included: a blue jay,a Blue Jay, then the blue jay,the Blue Jay, and of blue jays,of Blue Jays. Most of the Google ngram advanced search tools are useless in this regard; e.g., the _DET_ blue jay,_DET_ Blue Jay to return assorted determiner (a/an, the, this, that, those, etc.) matches cannot distinguish case, and the blue jay _END_,Blue Jay _END_ search to only return results from ends of "sentences" interprets all titles and headings as if sentences. It must be done with specific lower-case words like "a"/"an", "the" and "of". Most trailing-word searches like blue jay nest,Blue Jay nest are not productive, or not enough to be statistically significant when they return any results at all, which is rarely. Possessives have to be excluded because the construction "the Someone's something" is rarely used, meanwhile the "a/an" and "of" cases aren't statistically significant enough by themselves.

It also must be noted that virtually all field guides capitalize all species, and many other specialist publications do as well, which strongly skews the numbers upward for capitalization (i.e., the capitalization figures would be much lower if such works could be excluded and the ngrams only run against general-audience publications). Nevertheless, most search results strongly favor lower case anyway; this unquestionably dispels any notion that capitalization of common names of species is normal outside of specialist publications.

Birds: Here are the top 10 American bird species by both frequency of sightings and largest populations, with the lists merged (they had duplicate entries), and minus "mallard", which is used in too many other contexts to be certain that the results were mostly for the duck species as such. [93]

American bird ngrams
  • "American Crow" vs "American crow": Inconsistent results, some for upper case, some for lower, but perhaps an edge to upper, probably because of the ambiguity (the American crow species vs. crows in the US or the Americas more broadly). [94] [95] [96]
  • "Northern Cardinal" vs. "northern cardinal": Lower case throughout the 1990s, then a sudden spike for upper case. [97] [98] [99]
  • "Dark-eyed Junco" vs. "dark-eyed Junco": Lower case. [100] [101]
  • "Mourning Dove" vs "mourning dove": Lower case. [102] [103] [104]
  • "Downy Woodpecker" vs. "downy woodpecker": Lower case. [105] [106] [107] (some data suggests a late-1990s capitalization spike)
  • "American Goldfinch" vs. "American goldfinch": Lower case. [108] [109] [110] (slight increase in capitalization in the late 1990s)
  • "Blue Jay" vs. "blue jay": Lower case. [111] [112] [113] (Note: This result is even with probably false positives for capitalization due to the sports team.)
  • "Black-capped Chickadee" vs. "black-capped chickadee": Lower case. [114] [115]
  • "House Finch" vs. "house finch": Lower case. [116] [117] [118] (some evidence of a capitalization spike in the early 2000s)
  • "Tufted Titmouse" vs. "tufted titmouse": Lower case. [119] [120] [121] [122]
  • "European Starling" vs. "European starling": Lower case. [123] [124] [125]
  • "American Robin" vs. "American robin": Mixed usage. [126] [127] [128] (Note: Some capitalization hits are probably for other phrases, e.g. "an American Robin Hood", "the American Robin Tunney", etc.)
  • "Common Grackle" vs. "common grackle": Mixed usage, but more lower than upper case. [129] [130] [131] (Note: This data is actually strongly skewed in favor of capitalization, because mostly only birder sources, which capitalize, use the full name of this bird; general sources will mostly simply say "grackle" by itself, dropping "common". This is actually true of a lot of the "American" cases, too. The fact that usage is not strongly in favor of capitalization in these cases is very telling: Even with every field guide in publication adding to the capitalization pile and fewer-than-normal non-birder sources for balance, there's still not strong showing of capitalization.)
  • "Canada Goose" vs. "Canada goose": Lower case. [132] [133] [134]
  • "Red-winged Blackbird" vs. "red-winged blackbird": Lower case. [135] [136] [137] (This is a crucial case, since the raison d'etre of the capitalization is that supposedly names like this will be just too terribly ambiguous and confuse people into thinking it means "blackbirds of any species that happen to have red wings" unless it's capitalized. Well, the sky did not fall, and people are not capitalizing this, and that's all there is to it.
  • "Snow Goose" vs. "snow goose": Lower case. [138] [139] [140] (This and several others here show that when "the" is prepended, the capitalization goes up a little, because we're getting hits from more field guides and other birder works that put "the" in front of species names, e.g. "The principal diet of the Snow Goose is..." vs. more typical mainstream hit like "It looked like a snow goose".)

The British top 10 with multi-word names (i.e., excluding "starling", "magpie", "robin", etc.; these one-word common names hit too many things other than the particular species, and most of the list were like that), [141], plus more from the top-10 British winter list (to make up for so many one-word-named ones) [142] and more from another site on British garden birds [143]:

British bird ngrams
  • "House Sparrow" vs. "house sparrow": Lower case. [144] [145] [146]
  • "Blue Tit" vs. "blue tit": Lower case. [147] [148] [149] [150] [151] [152] (But note that "blue tit" may well produce irrelevant results, e.g. for bodypainting, but this is somewhat reduced by excluding the American English corpus, since "tit" as a breast reference is a bit of an Americanism.) Lower case also goes for "Blue Titmouse" vs. "blue titmouse". [153] [154]
  • "Coal Tit" vs. "coal tit": Mixed usage, but more toward lower case. [155] [156] [157]
  • "Collared Dove" vs. "collared dove": Lower case. [158] [159] [160]
  • "Long-tailed Tit" vs. "long-tailed tit": Lower case. [161] [162] [163] (There's a very slight recent capitalization edge for the uncommon variant "Long-tailed Titmouse" vs. "long-tailed titmouse". [164])
  • "Carrion Crow" vs. "carrion crow": Lower case. [165] [166] [167]
  • "Great Spotted Woodpecker" vs. "great spotted woodpecker": Mixed usage. [168] [169] [170]
  • "Snow Bunting" vs. "snow bunting": Lower case. [171] [172] [173] (Some evidence of a slight late-2000s increase in capitalization.)
  • "Jack Snipe" vs. "jack snipe": Mixed usage. [174] [175] [176] (Note: This may produce false pro-capitalization results because there are people named Jack Snipe. Note also that incorrect capitalization of "jack" by itself, mistaking it for a proper name, accounts for some usage. [177] And the comnpounded versions are usually lower-cased. [178] [179] [180]
  • "Brent Goose" vs. "brent goose": Mixed usage. [181] [182] [183] (Factoring in mistaken partial capitalization as "Brent goose/geese" because of an assumption that Brent is a proper name, the lower casing actually wins out.)
  • "Song Thrush" vs. "song thrush": Lower case. [184] [185] [186] (Some evidence of increase in capitalization, but some of increase and then decrease.)
  • "Black-headed Gull" vs. "black-headed gull": Lower case. [187] [188] [189]
  • "Lesser Redpoll" vs. "lesser redpoll": Mixed usage. [190] [191] [192] (not commonly mentioned, and capitalization is usually with "the", so most often these are field guide hits.)
  • "Marsh Tit" vs. "marsh tit": Mixed usage, but more toward lower case. [193] [194] [195]

Reptiles and amphibians:

Except in specialty publications like species checklists and field guides, capitalization is virtually unheard-of. Using lists of popular, high-profile species, and searching back to the 1960s to try to get more hits (hits are much less common than for birds, and most species on such lists produce no ngrams):

Herptile ngrams
  • green sea turtle [196] (An especially damning case for capitalization, since this is a classic example of a name that is supposedly to ambiguous – too easily mistaken for "a sea turtle of some kind that happens to be green" – to not be capitalized, except almost no one capitalizes it, even when the stats are skewed by field guides and other pro-capitalization specialist books!)
  • Galapagos land iguana [197] [198] (no capitalized hits at all)
  • Tokay gecko [199] (no capitalized hits at all)
  • poison dart frog [200] (no capitalized hits at all)
  • eastern coral snake [201] (no capitalized hits at all)
  • eastern diamondback rattlesnake [202] (finally a few upper-case hits, but a tiny minority)
  • western diamondback rattlesnake [203] (ditto)
  • Pacific giant salamander [204] (ditto)
  • crested newt [205]
  • cane toad [206] (ditto)
  • Nile monitor [207] (ditto)
  • Indian cobra [208] (ditto)
  • saltwater crocodile [209] (ditto)
  • mugger crocodile [210] (no capitalized hits)
  • Gila monster [211] (a few more capitalized hits, but still over 2:1 against, and some of the capitalized ones are probably song titles, etc.)
  • Komodo dragon [212] (as with Gila monster; perhaps these two unusual names seem to inspire a bit more capitalization, because they sound like fairytale creatures)

Species lists

  • Bailey, R. M. (chairman); Lachner, E. A.; Lindsey, C. C.; Robins, C. R.; Roedel, P. M.; Scott, W. B.; Woods, L. P. (1960). A List of Common and Scientific Acceptance of the Committee’s Recommended Names of Fishes from the United States and Canada. Special Publication 2. (2nd ed.). Bethesda, Maryland, US: American Fisheries Society. Principle 5. Common names shall not be capitalized in text use except for those elements that are proper names (e.g. rainbow trout, but Sacramento perch).{{ cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list ( link)
    • Nelson, Joseph S.; Starnes, Wayne C.; Warren, Melvin L. (July 2002). "A Capital Case for Common Names of Species of Fishes–A white crappie or a White Crappie". Fisheries. 27 (7). American Fisheries Society. "Fisheries Forum Opinion" section, pp. 31–33. ISSN  0363-2415. Retrieved 2012-01-08.{{ cite journal}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list ( link). A highly defensive piece in favor of title-casing fish common names. It at least makes it plain that the proposal has nothing to do with common names being proper nouns, and it "is to us all a matter of convention". They believe that capitalization "best serves the interests of" their concept of "the fishery user" of common names, i.e. "fish biologists communicating" in "areas such as fisheries, science, management, administration, and education"; not the general public, though they feel that someday style guides might actually agree with them on their convention. [If that were actually plausible it would already have happened for bird names, and it has not, in academic publishing or general-audience publishing.]
      • Kendall, Robert L. (July 2002). "A Capital Punishment". Fisheries. 27 (7). op. cit. "Fisheries Forum Opinion" section, pp. 33–34. Retrieved 2012-01-08. {{ cite journal}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= ( help) (Truncated copy at this URL.) Kendall criticizes Nelson et al. for inappropriate "veneration" of species, undermining industry and academic credibility, pushing an agenda not within their scope, ignoring for no clear gain the grammar rules that matter to many people, trying to undo a very widespread consensus that was difficult and slow to forge, harming the ability of the list-publishing organizations to get international consensus on the vernacular fish names they are advancing, and ignoring the clear fact that capitalization of various things as if they were proper nouns is a practice that has been declining for "a long time". [He's right on that for sure - this Germanic capitalization of nouns has been disappearing from English since around the time of the American Revolution and was already extremely uncommon by the turn of the 20th century.]

Organizations

  • General biology organizations almost never capitalize common names.
    • National Geographic Society – lower case, "even" for bids (which are explicitly addressed here. NGS defers to "A Guide to Forming and Capitalizing Compound Names of Birds in English" (Auk, 95: 324–326), except rejecting the capitalization as "not appropriate in most NGS publications", which have a general, wide audience.
  • Capitalization is common at ornithology organizations, and WP:BIRDS asserts that they mostly do so under IOC's rules (however, IOC's own website only lists one partially compliant organization).
  • Here are some counter-examples
  • Organizations that are not writing exclusively for a narrow audience who do capitalize, but which are themselves also specialist publishers, do not capitalize:
    • Nature, Science, and virtually all other general science and biology peer-reviewed journals (WP:BIRDS dug up a single exception that permitted field-specific capitalization).
    • ADF&G Writer's Guide (PDF) (Second ed.). Alaska Department of Fish and Game. 1999. Archived from the original (PDF) on 24 July 2004. – Lower-cases all vernacular names, including birds, explicitly against in-house conventions of ornithology publishers: "[W]e do not follow [American Ornithologists' Union's] practice of capitalizing all common names of birds; instead, we follow the widespread nomenclatural custom using capitals for only that part of a common name that is an established proper name (e.g., Pacific loon, common loon)." They also explicitly do this with fish, despite the American Fisheries Society's preference for capitalization.

Journals

  • Capitalization is common in ornithology journals, and WP:BIRDS asserts that they mostly do so under IOC's rules (however, IOC's own website [213] only lists one compliant journal (as of June 2015), the Wilson Journal of Ornithology (which only uses the IOC list for birds outside of North and Central America).
  • But not all ornithology journals, not even all the major ones, require or even permit capitalization (contradicting frequent claims of unanimity by the pro-caps camp):
  • Non-ornithology journals virtually never permit capitalization: Science [214] Proceedings of the Royal Society, Part B: Biology (Proc. Biol. Sci.) [215] [216]; Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA [217] [218]; Respiration Physiology [219]; Animal Behavior [220]; Acta Crystallographica, Section D: Biological Crystallography [221], Molecular Biology and Evolution [222]; Comparative Biochemistry and Physiology, Part C: Toxicology & Pharmacology [223]; Journal of Thermal Biology [224]; and many, many others. Contrast this with WP:BIRDS participant insisting here that "Any source that does not capitalize bird names is immediately viewed as amateur." Um, WP:BOLLOCKS.

Style and grammar guides

  • Grammar guides standardize on lower case for species names, and (when they mention them) upper case for breeds and cultivars. Some even specifically eschew capitalization of bird names, e.g. DailyWritingTips.com: "[A]s in the case of plant names, animal names are not capitalized ('I spotted a red-tailed hawk,' not 'I spotted a Red-Tailed Hawk'), except when an element of the name is a proper noun, as in 'Steller's jay' and 'Siberian tiger.'" [225]
  • The Chicago Manual of Style (16th [online] ed.). U. of Chicago Pr. 2010.; full access requires paid account or hardcopy – explicitly lower-cases bird species common names and all others:
    • "Sec. 8: Names and Terms, Subsec. 8.127 Vernacular Names of Plants and Animals—additional resources" says "In general, Chicago recommends capitalizing only proper nouns and adjectives, as in the following examples, which conform to Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary: Dutchman's-breeches, jack-in-the-pulpit, mayapple, Cooper's hawk, rhesus monkey, Rocky Mountain sheep". Note "Cooper's hawk".
    • It says in the same section: "For the correct capitalization and spelling of common names of plants and animals, consult a dictionary or the authoritative guides to nomenclature, the ICBN and the ICZN", meaning the International Code of Botanical Nomenclature, recently renamed the International Code of Nomenclature for algae, fungi, and plants, and International Code of Zoological Nomenclature. Note they don't open-endedly say "authoritative guides", but specify the two guides they consider authoritative.
    • Here are some big interpretation hints: Dictionaries do not capitalize common names of species, including birds. The ICZN (which is an actual nomenclature authority, unlike the IOC) does not capitalize common names of species, including birds. The ICN/ICBN does not capitalize the common names of species, at all, despite some botanical groups liking to capitalize; see first source entry above.
    • At neither section does CMoS drill down to the narrow level of the IOC, much less suggest following different conventions for different orders of animals, nor academic/scientific conventions at all if they conflict with general usage.
    • At "8.118 Scientific style—additional resources", CMoS defers to [only] the ICZN and ICBN, here, too. At "8.119 Genus and specific epithet", it gives several examples of common names of species, and all are lower-case.
    • See also "7.48 Capitals for emphasis", which says: "Initial capitals, once used to lend importance to certain words, are now used only ironically (but see 8.93 [Platonic ideals])."
    • Common names of species also do not qualify as proper names/nouns under the terms at "5.6 Proper nouns", which can only be "the specific name of a person, place, or thing" [a species is not a thing, but a categorical classification of things; one might as well capitalize "Chevrolet Four-door Automobile"].
    • CMoS does not give a single example of a common name of any species being capitalized, except where it contains a proper name.
    • The 15th ed. is identical on all of these points, other than the section numbering, including "Cooper's hawk" as exemplary.
    • CMoS is generally considered the leading American style guide for non-journalistic writing.
    • Note that this is even after CMoS has had plenty of time (the 15th ed. dates to 2003) to pick up on this debate at WP and offline and change their mind, but they still side firmly with lower case.
  • The following style guides do not address the question at all, or only obliquely:
    • "The Guardian and Observer Style Guide" (2014 [226]), other than to suggest animal breeds (species are never mentioned) should be lower case. However, a very large percentage of this style guide's advice is appropriate only to informal British news journalism, and much of it conflicts directly with MOS.
    • "Style-book of the Manchester Guardian" (1928)
    • "BBC News Styleguide" (2003), but it is mostly about broadcasting, in which written style is of minimal to zero relevance
    • "English Style Guide: A handbook for authors and translators in the European Commission" (7th Ed., 2011); yet at sect. 8.1, it notes that non-technical usage of names that coincide with scientific ones are not capitalized or italicized: the genus Rhododendron but many rhododendron growers; this at least leans against any notion of capitalizing bird species names, since in many cases this exact coincidence will occur. Many other style guides also raise this same point, including CMoS.
    • "EU Interinstitutional Style Guide" (2011 [227]); it's "10.4. Capitals and lower case" section has nothing of relevance at all.

Encyclopedias

Grzimek's Animal Life Encyclopedia ( ISBN  0787653624) uses title-case capitalization for article titles and lower case in running prose

Dictionaries

  • Oxford English Dictionary – no capitalization ("blackbird, n. A common Eurasian thrush, Turdus merula")
  • Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary – no capitalization ("Cooper's hawk", etc.)
  • Merriam-Webster.com – no capitalization ("ovenbird: noun ... an American warbler (Seirurus aurocapillus) that builds a dome-shaped nest on the ground" [228])

Field guides

  • Almost all field guides on all topics use capitalization, boldfacing, italics, small-caps, underlining, font color, or Some Combination of These, to make entries stand out, often including in running text. This is simply emphasis as a visual scanning aid and does not represent any sort of formal standard. It's simply field guide style, and WP does not have to adopt it any more than we'd adopt journalism style or comic book style or textbook style or corporate memo style.
  • Yet not all bird field guides do capitalize, or do so consistently/sanely:
    • Firefly Encyclopedia of Birds ( ISBN  1552977773) – doesn't use "official" capitalization, but capitalizes the first letter of each species name, even in running text (i.e., "Europe has a lot of Barn swallows"). Virtually no one on Wikipedia would find this acceptable, and virtually no other sources do it.

Editorials

  • Anselm Atkins, in The Auk 100(4): 1003–1004 (October–December 1983) [ SORA link] [ JSTOR link]:

    "...what is the authority against [capitalization]? Any American dictionary. Look up 'blue jay.'"
    Atkins continues:

    "Most field guides and some other books do use capitals. On the other hand, birds are confined to lower case in the writings of Darwin, Thoreau, Muir, Aldo Leopold, Stephen Gould, and many others. Highly literate magazines such as Audubon, Smithsonian, National Geographic and National Wildlife do not capitalize birds' names. Neither do Science or Scientific American. A great number of writers and editors thus follow the dictionary rather than the CBE [Council of Biology Editors, which follows the IOC rule for bird names, or at least did at the time Atkins was writing]. ...

    "Language changes; grammatical usages come and go. There are no eternal verities here; convention and consent are all. Rules of grammar are not handed down from on high--they are merely a codification of actual usage. The dictionary says 'what is,' not 'what should be.' Nevertheless, it is proper to follow 'what is' as determined by the compilers of current dictionaries. Professional ornithologists and lepidopterists, whose writings surely constitute only a fraction of today's literature, cannot possibly win the day (but what a gallant showing of nets and binoculars against all those typewriters, word processors, and printing presses!). Lacking an Archimedes' fulcrum, we shall never change convention but only succeed in violating it. Meanwhile, our idiosyncrasy causes confusion among those who want to write birds' names correctly. It would be most helpful if we would generously concede and conform. As Humpty-Dumpty said (it's impossible to make it through a reflective essay without quoting Lewis Carroll), it is a question of who is to be master. In this instance, let us surrender to the dictionary. Until we do, we ornithologists, with our Important Capitals, continue to look Curiously Provincial."

    • Eloise F. Potter wrote a response to this, in The Auk 101(4):895–6 (October 1984) [ SORA link] [ JSTOR link]. It is probably the nastiest, least reasonable attack piece ever published in a peer-reviewed journal since the 19th century. The Auk's editors should be ashamed for running it. Here's an example of its combined ad hominem and straw man approach: "Anselm Atkins ... reminds me of my children when they were young and pleaded for special privileges by saying, 'But Mother, everybody's doing it!'" Some further character-assassinating argument to emotion, and a barely disguised version of the " no true Scotsman" fallacy: "In my opinion, biologists who oppose the recognition of vernacular names of plant and animal species as proper nouns [i.e., capitalized] are not interested in communicating effectively with the widest possible readership ...." Instead of addressing the point that no one outside of some ornithology journals capitalizes bird common names (and even they do it for ornithologist convenience, not because of any specious proper name argument), Potter just insists that vernacular names of all species (not just birds) are proper names, without any linguistic or philosophic understanding. Her only source for this idea is a 1945 edition of a grammar book intended for the elementary and middle school markets, and which actually contradicts her ("the name of a particular person, place, or thing" is the exact opposite of a name for a general class of things). She then berates anyone who disagrees for "slavish adherence to any particular style manual", apparently unaware of both the concept of psychological projection and the fact that Atkins and others point to all usage everywhere except the style promulgated by IOC.

      It's interesting that she writes: "During my 20 years as editor of The Chat, I have heard Atkins's arguments against the propriety of capitalizing English species names at least a hundred times." This is really remarkable. Even capitalizing bird names in the local newsletter of the Chattanooga Chapter of the Tennessee Ornithological Society, a hundred people have told her she's wrong, despite several journals in the field also preferring this practice. If this isn't proof that this capitalization scheme doesn't actually have much support even within ornithology, then what is? She closes with an observation that "the major ornithological journals" were also not capitalizing, but that she decided to do so in her newsletter because some grad student submitted a paper with "virginia pine" (lower-case "v"). This isn't even rational. The reason to capitalize "Virginia" has nothing to do with whether one should capitalize the entire thing as "Virginia Pine", as Potter advocates. The weird thing is Potter is well aware that the real rationale for the capitalization is just emphasis, making the text easier to skim by birders in a hurry: "Even specialists reading in their own field find capitalized or italicized words easy to pick out when they are scanning many pages of material in search of statements pertaining to a particular species." This is the same reason that field guides, manuals, and other insider material in all specializations of all kinds capitalize terms of art that general-audience publications do not. It's the diametric opposite of capitalization of something because it's a proper name, which is done in all publications.

      Potter also raised the same pseudo-issue that the pro-capitalization camp does on Wikipedia: "Without capitals or Latin names, how does one distinguish between three common black-headed gulls (three individuals of Larus ridibundus) and three common black-headed gulls (L. ridibundus, pipixcan, and atricilla)?" It's a self-answering question: You write more clearly and include the Latin names where needed, obviously. You don't even need the Latin names if you're trying to avoid them; just write better than a child would: "The species named the common black-headed gull is not to be confused with two other common species of gulls with black heads, Franklin's gull and the laughing gull." This is not rocket science (and note that Wikipedia does not capitalize that as Rocket Science, either).

  • Lund, Nick (July 9, 2013). "A Word on the Capitalization of Bird Names". The Birdist. self-published blog. – An impassioned pro-capitalization piece by a birdwatcher, who does not appear to understand that a trademark is not like a bird common name, and dismisses grammatical/linguistic arguments out of hand, without actually addressing them, simply on the basis that to lower-case a bird name "is to rob it of its magic" whatever that means, and is "disrespectful" to birders (as if the capitalization isn't equally disrespectful to everyone else). Like Potter, above, he also clearly indicates a confusion between proper names and emphasis: "Sometimes even capital letters at the start of the words aren't enough, and we distinguish species in bold or in all-caps." Wikipedia does not, nor do other mainstream sources, other than field guides. He does correctly, if awkwardly, note something about vernacular naming and how it is not really a scientific taxonomic dispute at all, but something for hobbyists to bicker about: "To a scientist, though, treating species not as icons but as data (or, more likely, with a much better understanding of the muddy fluidity that is the 'species' concept), or to a layperson, who couldn't give a crap either way, the common name is meaningless, unworthy of extra typeface." However, we know from 9 years of dispute here that lay readers do in fact care; they find the capitalization annoying or worse and (this being a wiki) frequently attempted to undo it, until Wikipedia finally abandoned it. The blogger's own respondents mostly disagree with him. D'oh. And these are birders, remember.
  • Penelope, Hillemann (December 12, 2010). "Bird Names: To Capitalize or Not". Penelopedia: Nature and Garden in Southern Minnesota. self-published. – The page leads with: "Update (Jan. 2014): This post ... is one of the most frequently visited posts I've written. The issue clearly comes up for people a lot." She encourages people to go through the readers' comments, and well we should. One will see the sharp divide between the rationality of writing for your readers, vs. the argument to emotion of obeying IOC's specialized-audience expectations no matter what the audience really is, insisting that not abusing capitalization this way is being "lazy" about the English language (a case of the Dunning–Kruger effect, with non-linguists assuming their linguistic ideas are correct and that those who disagree are at fault), and/or not recognizing the difference between the faulty proper name argument, the appeal to authority in trying to push the IOC specialized journal practice everywhere, and capitalization for scannability/emphasis.

    The core point of the piece is this: "There's a split here, basically between ornithologists and the rest of the writing world, except where style guides expressly defer to the common usage in a particular field." (Hint: Wikipedia expressly does not.) This practice in the world of ornithology departs from that in most other areas of plant and animal classification, which follows the generally accepted rule of reserving capitalization for proper nouns (such as names of specific people and places, and trade names). She continues: "Some defenders of the IOC approach say that birds' names ARE proper names, equating Bald Eagle with Johnny Depp, but that doesn't explain why most other groups of animal and plant biologists don't apparently feel the same." She also, as did IOC's own website, mentioned that Wikipedia at that time seemed to be making "an exception" for birds. That wasn't actually correct (MOS observed that there was a then-unresolved dispute about birds and that people shouldn't editwar over it), and is now moot. Hillemann's piece is divided on what to do: "As a writer and editor (this is a significant part of what I do for a living) who is not a trained ornithologist, I have to say those capitals catch my eye. When I use them in my blog posts, they start to bug me. They look old-fashioned and, as Atkins notes, overly Important. They don't seem necessary for clarity most of the time when I or others are writing carefully, though they do indeed convey instant information that sometimes helps avoid ambiguity." (I.e., capitalization for emphasis.)

    Her ultimate conclusion: "I'm not sure I have a final decision. And, after all this wallowing, I'm not sure that it's really all that important to decide. But if I were writing a ... style guide right now, here's where I think I'd start, recognizing that I'm a generalist who writes for a wide audience, not an expert writing for a scholarly audience:

    • Use IOC format (caps) in lists of bird species, but --
    • Use dictionary format (no caps) in general text. There, I said it. I feel relieved. But I will --
    • Add the Latin species name in parentheses when needed for clarity"

    In the comments section, she wisely distinguishes between false analogies, such as Potter's likening of a species common name to Lincoln Continental, a trademark. She also observes: "people who are knowledgeable about birds simply are not likely to use terms like "yellow warbler" and "gray jay" to describe a generic bird of that description"; i.e., they know to write clearly to avoid ambiguity. She quotes someone else in a Bird Forum discussion making the same point: "'[I]n truth you would never write it in that way, you would adjust your language to make clear what you were saying.'" Hillemann concludes: "I believe that when writing for a general audience, using language carefully is at least as powerful a tool for clear communication as using capitals for bird names."

  • http://www.birdforum.net/showthread.php?t=204022 – Bird Forum discussion. [Not examined yet.]
  • Dawson, W. Leon (May–June 1907). "In Regard to the Mooted Points". The Condor. 9 (3): 95–96. [ JSTOR link] – This debate goes at least as far back as 1907. In addition to objecting to use of the metric system, Dawson makes an impassioned "hearty Yes!" argument for capitalization, on two grounds 1) "prominence and eye ease" (i.e., capitalization for emphasis), and 2) the argument that the common names are more stable than the Latin scientific names. In hindsight, this proves not to be true. Modern genetics and cladistics has nailed down most genera pretty well, while it turns out that for a large number of species, there are multiple vernacular names, and IOC itself has even tried to impose new ones that are not used by anyone, in vain attempts to split the difference. Dawson writes that "the English[-language] name in fact deserves as much consideration at the hands of an editor who would be understood as the scientific name." That's arguably true, but it does not logically follow that capitalization is the only or best way to do that. Dawson then makes the argument with which we're all already familiar: "the name of a species, whether English or Latin, is a proper name." As with others who stood on his shaky shoulders, he appears to not actually understand the principles behind proper names from either the linguistics perspective or philosophy one. His idea is simply that because we don't call individual specimens of Audubon's warbler (Setophaga coronata auduboni, which he calls the "Audubon Warbler", demonstrating how the vernacular name has changed despite his insistence that they don't change) by names like "Mary", that this must mean "Audubon Warbler" is a proper name. That's not a cogent argument at all. One does not name the individual rocks in the gravel in one's driveway "Steve", "Janet", etc., but this does not make "My Driveway Gravel" a proper name, despite this gravel being clearly distinguished from the gravel in your neighbor's driveway, or the gravel at the bottom of a river 20 miles away. But more to the point, many people do individually name plenty of birds with "personal" names, as pets or familiar frequent wild visitors. It has nothing to do with whether a species epithet, our term for an aggregate group, is a proper name. Such labels are not proper names, except, by universal (not specialist) convention when applied to a few narrowly defined classes of things, almost all of them human (e.g., ethnicities, and political parties). Anyway, Dawson concludes with the other tired assertion that we can't be understood if we don't capitalize, because "evening grosbeak" might refer to the Evening Grosbeak (as he writes it), or any grosbeak seen in the evening. But even a child understands that all we have to do is write carefully to avoid such an ambiguity.

    Dawson goes further than most, demanding "let us use capitals always in presenting specific names of birds, and elsewhere in referring to the higher groups, wherever uncertainty is likely to exist in the mind of the dullest reader." At least we know how he feels about non-ornithologists. He actually suggests that "Warbler" be capitalized to distinguish a reference to the Mniotiltidae family (which he spells Mniotiltidæ, though that could be an editorial change). Even IOC doesn't recommend this. The take-away conclusion is that the arguments for capitalization have not improved in any way in over 100 years, and that proponents of it simply don't acknowledge refutation of their position, no matter how many generations of people refute it. They just re-assert their position as if it were new and unassailable. This is known as the fallacy of proof by assertion. That the arguments have not even slightly been adjusted in all this time is highly curious. They originate from a time when Victorian prescriptive grammar was strongly in favor of a large amount of capitalization that current, modern English does not accept. Dawson's own letter refers to the publisher as "the Society", the publication's editor as "Mr. Editor", and the publisher's president as "the President" (in mid-sentence, not in a salutation, and without being attached to any names), a practice no modern style guide endorses. So why would a capitalization idea that dates to an age of over-capitalization (which back then would probably be capitalized as Age of Over-Capitalization) have such stubborn staying power? See WP:Specialized-style fallacy for why. Insiders in all fields just really like to capitalize stuff that's important to them, and occasionally they insistently push this style outside their field. We're all really tired of it.

  • Polunin, Nicolas (March 1953). "Capitalization or Decapitalization Encore une Fois!". Taxon. 2 (2): 25–26. [ JSTOR link&#93 – Polunin describes how fighting over capitalization directly disrupted the Seventh International Botanical Congress (Stockholm, 1950). This nonsense hasn't only been disruptive on Wikipedia for ten years, but generally, everywhere, for generations. He expressed doubt that instituting a simple rule like " Specific and subspecific epithets should be written with a small initial letter" (even when derived from proper names, even in journals that have a "tradition" of capitalizing them) would actually work. But it did; these are no longer capitalized by anyone, anywhere. This is an important lesson: Make a rule, with across-the-board applicability, insist on it, and don't change it. Whether every single person agrees it's the best rule, and some may badly desire an exception, is far less important that putting an end to pointless strife about trivia, by instituting a rule and moving on. Those who can't stand the rule will eventually just die, humans being mortal after all.

Advocacy of IOC or some other PoV-pushing "standard"

  • Talk:Hooded Dotterel#Requested move (January 2014)
  • WP:BIRDCON and discussions leading up to it; those in favor of lower case disproved, through off-site research, that claims of IOC being a widely accepted standard were false; even IOC's own website very clearly indicates what little real-world buy-in it has, and that even where aspects of it are accepted, others are not, inconsistently. Use of IOC style conventions on WP was a patent case of WP:ADVOCACY by fans of the spread of IOC conventions in the real world.
  • Template:IOC name exception: "IOC World Bird Names ... is the de facto naming standard within the Wikiproject:Birds." This was really problematic. Template deleted at TfD: Wikipedia:Templates for discussion/Log/2018 November 14#Template:IOC name exception in 2018. It was a lingering bit of WP:BATTLEGROUNDing that needed to be nuked back in 2014, but which didn't get noticed and was still appearing in about 30 articles. It was created by the same person who was regularly updating the IOC website with news of their "progress" in forcing IOC names into Wikipedia as an "official standard" here.

Possible alternative solution to lower-casing

Stale
 – This idea has not been popular so far (see talk page); small-caps is a rather disfavored style, but we're low on alternatives other than underlining.

Short version: Stop capitalizing vernacular names (except for a proper name inside a vernacular), but instead use the {{ Smallcaps}} template: California slender salamander.

Extended content

Why we should bother to consider this any further:

There's a long-standing consensus on Wikipedia as a whole, since 2008 and reaffirmed by extensive discussions in 2012, and reaffirmed again every time the issue comes up in a venue that isn't controlled by a pro-capitalization wikiproject, to use lower case for the common (vernacular) names of species. As of 2014-04-21, a straw poll at WT:MOS shows a 3-to-1 majority in favor of lower-case, and this is consistent with past discussions. Isn't the matter already over?

I've been doing a lot of thinking about this, and have come to the conclusion that there are principally two factors at work here that make resolution of the matter difficult and, regardless of polls and RfCs, are likely to lead to continued unhappiness and strife no matter which way such a binary choice goes:

  1. Many writers, both on and off Wikipedia, in and out of academia, recognize capitalization in particular as not just some kind of emphasis like boldfacing, italicizing, use of small-caps, underlining, etc. MOS (see MOS:CAPS) is quite explicit about this and has been for years. While not everyone agrees, and some (particularly in specialty publications where writing conventions are often bent on purpose to expedite communication among professionals/devotees, in a form of code) do want to treat capitals as simply a style choice, for many it is palpably different. This isn't a matter of whim or subjective opinion, as this view is supported by most reliable sources on English-language writing. Capitalization has much stricter rules surrounding it (in English, anyway), in virtually all style guides and other sources of guidance on how to write in this language. This is why people care more, react more negatively, to neologistic usage like capitalizing all names of a certain class of things as if they're proper names, more so than they react to, say, italicizing them. The language is steadily moving away from capitalization, so it is unlikely that the "why the hell is that capitalized?!" reaction is going to get anything but stronger. [Note that I'm not making any kind of prescriptive or value-based judgment here; this is all just descriptive observation of facts.]
  2. While many of the specialty publications of virtually all fields engage in emphasis of some sort as a simple stylistic convention, capitalization in a handful of fields has become so ingrained that it may be perceived as "insulting" to its practitioners/constituents or "ignorant" to do it any other way (even while everyone else feels the same way about the imposition on them of this capitalization). The principal, often only, reason is that the emphasis is useful for disambiguation. [In the birds case, a claim has been also made by some WP:BIRDS editors that there's a formal, universally accepted international standard, but this is an exaggeration.] They already know the arguments against this clarity idea in this medium in particular, which can disambiguate with linking and using clearer writing, yet some of them insist on it anyway. Resistance to lower-casing is not universal among specialists whose fields often capitalize common names in their own specialist publications; e.g., herpetologists have not put up a fight about it, and almost all of the reptile and amphibian articles have been decapitalized without any fuss, from specialists or from readers. But it happens often enough to be a problem. The arguments (whether one considers them strong or not) to do away with the capitalization here consequently makes those who prefer it for reasons they see as important feel like they're being singled out and picked on.

This conflict continues because the pro-LC side see capitalization for emphasis as unacceptably abusive of a distinct, especially meaningful feature of the language as if it were the same as some others (which are all typeface styling), and that it's being done for no reason but inappropriate emphasis, while the pro-UC side are firmly convinced that they're being denied, for no reason, the same kind or level (if not precise form) of markup that is used to denote titles of published works, or foreign words interpolated into English, or whathaveyou, and that not getting to capitalize causes serious ambiguity problems in their material.

What if there were another way, that didn't play favorites? Using small-caps style is the most obvious such way, and would not conflict with other usage or rules.

One thing I've picked up in the course of researching both the MOS:ORGANISMS draft and this entire "birdcaps" dispute is that many sources (journals, field guides, websites, encyclopedic works, prosey naturalist writing, etc.) in many biological fields as well as more general works, do believe firmly in the power of typographically disambiguating, e.g., the California slender salamander from slender salamanders in California. But they often do it without resorting to use/abuse of capitalization. The most common alternative is small-capitals typography, of the specific form distinguishes actual capitalization: California slender salamander. WP doesn't presently use that kind of typography for much of anything programmatic, and I can see a strong argument being made for using it in biological articles for the formal English-language vernacular names of species of anything, when they're being discussed as species. I.e., it would be used for both " cougar" and "mountain lion" but not regionalisms or slang like "painter" with regard to that species, nor for foreign names not assimilated into English like "okapi" has been. Nor would it be used when distinguishing species is not important, e.g. in "injured while riding a horse".

It still would not entirely please every one of the birders, some of whom are [unreasonably, in my view] convinced that bird names are proper names and must be capitalized no matter what, that the capital letters in particular are somehow more important than the disambiguation-by-emphasis function they serve. But it seems like a reasonable compromise, and WP:Consensus does not require total unanimity. All indications may be that, WP-wide, there's at least a 2/3 majority in favor of lower-casing all vernacular names, so, the argument goes, we might as well just do it. But why go that "we win, so stop capitalizing" route, which smacks of us-vs.-them thinking and WP:WINNING, if it's guaranteed to piss off some subset of productive editors, if there's a way to keep almost everyone happy? That's my thinking. [I'm much more peace-minded that I get credit for.] Those to whom the disambiguation function is more important than the upper-case form should like this idea. No more "it is/is not a proper name" fight, either. [That's a fight that capitalizers will lose, because the reliable sources in linguistics and philosophy of language are strongly against them on this.]

The best way to approach implementing this might be a bit technological, with a {{vernacular name}} template (with a shortcut like {{vername}}) that takes care of this stuff as a CSS style matter. This way people with accounts can use their own CSS pages here to disable or change this styling if they want. I'm thinking that user-level Javascript might even be able to force-capitalize for those who want them capitalized, without imposing it on others.

 —  SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  01:01, 22 April 2014 (UTC) (subject to revision)

PS: Yes, do feel free to use the talk page here if this is worth discussing in this form.  —  SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  11:03, 22 April 2014 (UTC)

A variant of this idea is to similarly use such a template, with a CSS class, to apply some other stylistic change, e.g. a serif font, that raises fewer objections than smallcaps does. Those who actually like the smallcaps idea can simply use CSS to change it to that style. THose who don't want any such style can do likewise to remove it. It's also noteworthy that such a solution can also be implemented for the official names of standardized breeds, should we want to decapitalize them (which is maybe a 50/50 chance).  —  SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  22:30, 31 May 2015 (UTC)

Unexamined discussions (may need link-fixing because of archival)

Other organism-related titling issues

Scientific versus vernacular names

There are a whole bunch of threads about this, especially regarding plants and extinct animals, but also broader ones.

Just starting with 1 link for now, but there are probably 50+ to find:

Naming-unrelated

Behavior/temperament sections at breed articles, and the original research and bad sourcing they're full of:

See also

Relevant policies and guidelines

Quoted in May 2014 – may need updating.

Relevant essays

  • Wikipedia:Specialized-style fallacy ( WP:SSF): An in-depth (albeit intemperate) exploration of all the reasoning flaws involved in pushing onto Wikipedia various style quirks from specialist publications
  • Wikipedia:Don't feed the nabobs ( WP:NABOBS): "[C]onsider whether or not doing something would make Wikipedia look silly to those who don't 'get' Wikipedia like we do. And if it would, in that case, the likely answer is: don't." The biggest complaint about capitalizing species common names is that it makes Wikipedia look like it's written by marginally-literate twits who capitalize misc. noun phrases as a clumsy form of emphasis.
  • Wikipedia:Competence is required ( WP:COMPETENCE) "Assuming that people are trying to help seems trivial—but if someone is ... sometimes helpful but at others majorly disruptive, this may generate a net loss to a project that must not be allowed to continue." "The best good will is for nought if a basic understanding of the facts, their mainstream interpretation, and their cultural context are lacking."
  • Wikipedia:Expert retention#A cumulatively dysfunctional system: " Tribes of influential (= have the most free time on their hands) admins and editors have decided that WP policies say something other than what they actually say. They want to have loose reins to make WP their playground for their own particular agendas. People who follow strict and standardized interpretations of policies threaten that and must be stalked and rebuffed. ... The problem on WP is not so much the obvious trolls but the ones who ... see the truth of contrary arguments yet refuse from selfishness to acknowledge them; who endlessly Wikilawyer the most obvious points, and enforce not the policies but the policies as they privately interpret them through the grid of their own private agendas." The rest of the essay is, unfortunately, almost totally in favor of wikiprojects having increased fiefdom-like editorial control. However, it's also been moribund for several years.
  • Wikipedia:WikiProject Birds#Bird names and article titles ( WP:BIRDS#Naming): Principal source of all this strife. Advanced as a "guideline" by its proponents, it's just a wikiproject advice page essay. It said to use capitalization (and not only for IOC names, but all common names of bird species). It was updated to stop conflicting with MOS:LIFE, but who knows if it will stay that way.
Retrieved from " https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=User:SMcCandlish/Organism_names_on_Wikipedia&oldid=1216286762#Some_previous_discussions_of_breed_disambiguation"
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This is a not-yet-complete Wikipedia discussion history of the lower- vs. upper-casing of vernacular names of organisms, and how to disambiguate them. Data goes back to 2003, though I started this log in late 2014 (based on an external text file I was maintaining since at least 2012). Since early 2015, the focus has shifted from species to breeds; the breed material has been moved higher up toward the top.

Overview: The bare fact of the matter is that a lot of people just habitually capitalize things that are important to them, while others, from all walks of wiki-life, feel that this is jarring and distracting to the average reader, and may even be seen as puerile and questionably literate (because the rationale for it isn't known to anyone but specialists in particular subdisciplines – such attempt to come of as "hyper-academic" actually backfire badly in a general encyclopedia). This is an entirely non-trivial usability and public relations issue for Wikipedia. That said, there are actually some at least fairly strong arguments in favor of the capitalization of the names of formal breeds (and cultivars) that are not arguments that pertain to species. A different but related issue is the penchant for fanciers of particular types of animals to resist natural disambiguation and insist on parenthetic style, policy be damned. Finally, even species capitalization – in a handful of narrow specialities – has the pro argument for it that WP should do what the specialist sources do in any particular topic area. But as one editor summarized it, Wikipedia has to decide to whom it will look a bit ignorant: A small number of academics, or a very large number of everyone else. The answer is clear, especially when major academic journals will not permit the over-capitalization preferred by specialists in a couple of fields, even in articles about those fields. The breeds case is essentially the opposite; real breeds with published breed standards (not just diffuse landraces and breed "types") are much more broadly treated as proper names, although there are conflicting lower/upper-case patterns in various newspapers and dictionaries (and some style guides are even self-contradictory on the question).

The current (as of 2022) consensus, in a nutshell: MOS:LIFE codified what the community has arrived at after all these years of debate:

  • Do not capitalize the common (vernacular) names of species or any other grouping of organism, other parts of these terms that are proper names like "Grevy's" or "Sardinian", or which are beginning a sentence.
  • The exceptions are standardized animal breeds, and formal cultivars (and trade designations) of domesticated plants. These are treated as proper names.
  • Use natural disambiguation when possible.
  • For scientific names, follow standard Genus species subspecies (or Genus species var. variety) format, as found in reliable sources; see MOS:ORGANISMS for in-depth guidance.

Recent-ish discussions and actions (2015–)

Update needed?
  • Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Capital letters#Should dog breed names be capitalized? (October–November 2015)
  • Actual move requests are covered in a section for this below.
  • There appear to have been no attempts to re-capitalize the vernacular names of any species.
  • The cleanup operations to decapitalize them appear to be nearly complete. Various people have worked on this, both in moving articles, and in copyediting their content. SMcCandlish tracked down a lot of this in non-bird articles (due to continued personal attacks from WP:BIRDS participants), especially on rodents, primates, cetaceans, and felines. Other tackled the bird article. Flying insects in two groups (dragonflies and moths/butterflies), and some plants (especially the endemically British ones) are still capitalized in many places as of 2017.
  • Late 2014 to early 2015 saw a lot of discussion, renewed in late 2015, and especially in WP:RMs and for a bit at WT:RM, about capitalization and disambiguation of the names of standardized animal breeds (see #breeds, below), but there is not, as of October 2015, any proposal to either decapitalize breed names, nor any to change MOS to recommend capitalizing them, though the WT:MOSCAPS thread about dog breeds has suggested an RfC about the issue more generally could be finally in order. The uneasy status quo is that MOS:LIFE does not actually address breed names in particular. It does address groups of animals generally, and many view this as applying to breeds. SMcCandlish statement:

    As the principal author of that section's current wording, I can state that it was intentionally written to be broad enough to include breeds, and that the examples provided intentionally include domestic landraces, and domestic "types" or "breed groups", but do not include formal breeds. This is because there's an incidental WP:FAITACCOMPLI situation in which virtually all animal breed articles are already capitalized (and were before MOS addressed such matters), so deciding what should be done with them is liable to be a long, unhappy WP:RFC discussion. If consensus goes to lower-case breeds, the only MOS change needed is the inclusion of an example of that sort. If consensus goes to retain capitalization, the only MOS change needed is a statement that it does not apply to standardized breeds. I suspect (but do not advocate) that the latter will be the ultimate result, for reasons I go into in more depth at #breeds; the rationales for capitalizing breeds are different from and might be stronger than those for doing so with vernacular names of species.

  • The draft comprehensive guideline on biological nomenclature at MOS:ORGANISMS remains held up (for several years now) by WP's failure to resolve the "capitalize animal breeds or not?" question, and includes drafts of both a pro- and anti- capitalization section.

Capitalization (and disambiguation) of breeds and cultivars

The issues outlined below were largely resolved in January 2019 at Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)/Archive 150#RfC on capitalization of the names of standardized breeds, with resultant changes made to MOS:LIFE to call for the capitalization of standardized breeds and cultivars (but not breed groups/types, landraces, crossbreeds, hybrids, color variants within breeds, etc.).

The concerns raised on both sides of the "capitalization divide" are not all identical, for standardized breed and cultivar names, to those of species. The current WP:FAITACCOMPLI situation is that all of the breed article names (and many on landraces, which should definitely not be capitalized) have been capitalized by those who favor upper case. I've even helped make this consistent, because it's better to have 100% of them capitalized, for reader-experience consistency, than something like 93.2% of them capitalized, and because most of them had already been capitalized since before 2010. SMcCandlish note: I've remained essentially neutral on this matter (more like wavering back and forth as new rationales appear; see below) for over a decade on Wikipedia now, though I've used WP:RM to move some uncapitalized ones to capitalization to be WP:CONSISTENT, without really taking a stand on whether they really should have mostly been capitalized to begin with; I just observed that they mostly were.  —  SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  15:44, 15 November 2015 (UTC)

The debates (there are many more pages not added to the list below yet) about this style matter actually raise some different issues than those about capitalization of vernacular ("common") names of species, and need to be tracked and examined separately. Capitalization of common names of species is a peculiarity of some specialist publications in ornithology, certain narrow branches of entomology, and (apparently) some regional botany, but rejected outside those fields both in biological (zoological, botanical) specialist publications and in general-audience writing.

By contrast, capitalization of all of the following is near-universal in the respective specialist literature (except perhaps for lab strains):

  1. standardized breeds (not landraces, breed groups, or other informal domesticated animal classifications) of: as recognized by fancier and agricultural organizations. Thus, Golden Retriever but not retriever generally.
  2. Human-cultivated plant varieties – cultivars (including cultivated hybrids, and greges) – with formal, standardized names (e.g. the Granny Smith apple but not crab apples, a general categorization, and again, not landraces or other non-standardized cultigens)

This increased frequency of capitalization of breeds/cultivars in topical reliable sources may make the argument for capitalization in Wikipedia stronger, though by no means a settled matter yet, especially given that more mainstream, generalist publications (e.g. newspapers, other encyclopedias, dictionaries, non-specialist magazines and books) often do not capitalize them except where they contain a proper name. That said, general publications do capitalize them more frequently than they capitalize vernacular names of species (which is nearly never).

Capitalization pro and con

Shortcut

Some of the arguments against capitalizing species apply equally well to any standardized breeds and cultivars, except when it is a registered trademark or otherwise qualifies as a proper noun. But some of them do not, and there are additional arguments that pertain to domestic animal breeds (and plant cultivars, sometimes differently) that do not pertain to species' vernacular names.

In particular, the wide support for capitalization of the names of standardized botanical varieties, cultivars and hybrids in mainstream style guides, and increasing frequency in mainstream publications, could indicate that WP should consider capitalizing formal animal breeds, since the difference is just a matter of biological regnum. Most of them will be capitalized anyway because they're based on proper names (no one is going to write siamese), or often have names that are German, a language that always capitalizes nouns.

Capitalization of breeds, cultivars and varieties is subject sometimes to external conventions. How much WP wants to honor them really depends on how much they conflict with average, non-specialist readers' expectations. The existence of would-be standards outside WP is no guarantee of, or necessarily even a good argument for, Wikipedia adopting them, especially when there are competing variants.

Wikipedia policies and guidelines:

  • MOS:LIFE, since the WP:BREEDCAPSRFC in 2019, says to capitalize a standardized breed, following the style used in the breed standard; and WP:NCFAUNA agrees. Before that RfC, both guidelines, among other pages, did not directly address breeds but consistently could be interpreted as saying not to capitalize them, as part of the general class of things that are not proper names and are not overwhelmingly capitalized in external sources. But this interpretation was not having any known effect (most breeds were capitalized on Wikipedia), and in the 2008–2014 redrafting and normalization of these guidelines, breeds were omitted from mention on purpose, the matter being deferred for later consensus determination after the lower-casing of species names was completed and adjusted to. Nevertheless, some editors involved in drafting what is mostly still the extant language are quite certain that decapitalizing breed names was actually among the intended results; others feel the opposite about it. MOS:LIFE clearly does call for the lower-casing of both a) vernacular names of species and (and subspecies), and b) general terms for a type of organization. Until the results of the aforementioned RfC, it did not does not mention breeds or cultivars specifically (nor did its examples illustrate any, intentionally, though they included landraces and breed " types", which are nothing like standardized breeds and more like sub-subspecies). Breed and cultivar names are much more specific than even a subspecies epithet. They're also tied directly to human activity, and do not refer to wild populations of anything, by definition.
  • Draft MOS:ORGANISMS - An essentially completed guideline to unify scientific and vernacular style on Wikipedia. It's very in-depth (at least for an encyclopedia style guide), was several years in the making, and is the most intensively researched MoS page. It was long stuck in a half-finished draft state, presenting both the pro- and con-capitalization cases for breeds as of December 2018. Failure of WP to arrive at a consensus on this one style question was the main reason the guideline remained a {{ Draft proposal}} for so long (probably a Wikipedia record, for a page that is actually in use and followed, aside from that one disputed section). As of 2023, it still says draft on it for some reason.

Arguments for capitalization of English-language names of breeds and cultivars (under construction and open to further input):

  • Capitalization has already been applied to standardized breeds' names, site-wide. Undoing it now would be like a WP:MEATBOT action, and would not objectively improve the encyclopedia, just favor one form of consistency over another.
  • Virtually all specialist sources for/by breeders and fanciers capitalize breed names [though not always consistently with each other, especially after a hyphen].
  • A large proportion of breeds are capitalized no matter what (in English) because they are or include adjectival proper names ("Pekingese", "Australian", etc.); the comparatively small number that are not could be confusing (at least to editors) as exceptions.
  • A few breeds are proper names no matter what because they're trademarks (mostly in livestock and lab animals, but see also the Ragdoll cat).
  • A significant number [though a minority] of general-audience publications capitalize breed names even where they do not contain a proper name; the style is not jarring to readers, so it is not a specialized-style fallacy.
    • There's a comprehension issue: If I write "American shorthair cat" or "Lithuanian white pig", I could be talking about the breeds or about any cat in the US with short hair and any white pig from Lithuania. "American Shorthair cat" and "Lithuanian White pig" make it clear I mean the breeds.
  • Breeds/cultivars are a human creation, not naturally evolved ones, and thus are like works of art or models of automobile, and thus should be treated as proper names.
  • Standardized breeds are, in effect, publications (the standards themselves, issued by a breed registry or the like); at very least they're a special designation or title that is earned through proven pedigree and conformation. An argument can thus be made that they're proper names.
    • Standardized breeds are, by their nature, also directly comparable to awards of recognition to successful breeding programs. [This argument does not apply to landraces, historical breeds before the advent of breed standards, and other informal "breeds".] Two points in favor of this argument for standardized breeds are:
    • In some breed registries, an individual animal with a pedigree entirely within a breed may fail to qualify as member of the breed due to failing to fit the conformation specification in the standard.
    • In some registries, individual animals with no pedigree may be accepted as members of certain breeds based on nothing but visual conformation and geographical origin (e.g. a Manx cat either has a pedigree as one, or came from the Isle of Man and upon examination conforms to the standard).
  • Standardized breeds can also be analogized to fictional creations (like Hobbits and Wookies), since they're an arbitrary concept from the human mind not a description of nature. They are also similar to technical specifications, for the same reason. If the International System of Units can decide that the names and symbols of power units are watt (W), volt (V) and ampere (A), and ohm (Ω) – not "Watt", not "w", etc. (even though not all newswriters, etc., get it right); then thus stands to reason that breed federations can establish long and short names of breeds and how to capitalize in them. For breeds (as of horses) with names determined by national breed-specific clubs rather than international federations, they are akin to trademarks of particular companies.
  • Many breed names that do not include proper names are German, and in that language are always capitalized as as nouns or noun phrases; purists may thus object to lower-casing them in English, even for names assimilated into English.
  • Cultivars and trade designations – plant breeds – are uniformly capitalized in virtually all sources.
    • Animal breeds should receive the same consideration just for consistency, despite no uniform system of orthography for them in scientific literature. I.e., do not assume that our editors are nomenclature experts; just give them a simple rule to follow.
    • It is better to treat breeds and cultivars exactly the same way, despite any rationale differences for capitalizing one but not the other, because only experts are liable to know or even understand those differences, and the result would be reader-confusingly inconsistent.
    • Lower-casing animal breeds would inspire an attempt to lower-case cultivars, which would lead to an even worse dispute than that which surrounded lower-casing of species names.
  • Standardized breeds surely must be proper names, like "Europeans" and "the Weather Underground" because they uniquely name clearly identifiable groups. The scientific names of species, and the formal names of cultivars (plant breeds) are treated as proper names (with special formatting such as Homo sapiens and 'Granny Smith'); denying even capitalization to standardized breeds of livestock would be a WP:CONSISTENT problem, denying any form of proper naming to them.

Arguments against capitalization of English-language names of breeds and cultivars (under construction and open to further input):

  • WP:CONTENTAGE is an "argument to avoid" (and see also WP:FAITACCOMPLI). WP has plenty of times undone a site-wide decision because it was a bad idea (date auto-formatting and auto-linking, spoiler templates in plot summaries, species capitalization, etc.).
  • Non-specialist sources generally do not capitalize breed names except where they contain a proper name. [This majority is not as large as it is for non-specialist sources that do not capitalize species common names, however.] Specialized sources are more reliable for facts about a topic, but not for how to best write general-audience English about the topic.
  • There's no evidence readers are confused about breeds being in lower-case (aside from capitalized proper names), or newspapers and the like would not use lower-case. Rewrite to avoid ambiguous constructions, just as we do with species vernacular names. It is the "job" of WP editors to properly research what they are writing about, including the origin and meaning of its name.
    • There is no comprehension issue, unless one simply is a terrible writer. For any case in which "Lithuanian white pig" could be ambiguous, just write "the Lithuanian white pig breed", or the like. And "American shorthair" cannot be anything but a breed, since "shorthair" isn't a real word but only used in a breed names; a random cat with short hair is short-haired. "Lithuanian White" would not make it clear to readers one meant the breed, since using capitals this way is not a convention in everyday English; the average reader will not understand the special breeder-jargon "signification" capitals.
  • Breeds that are trademarks or placenames can be capitalized without extending that proper name privilege to all other breed names. This is exactly the same as with any other topic, and treating breeds differently is a specialized-style fallacy.
  • All human labels, including for genetic and phenotypic abstractions, are artificial, so the "human not natural" argument for capitals is baseless. There is thus no difference for WP style purposes between a species and a breed. Since we do not capitalize the English-language common names of species (or subspecies), we should not do so for breeds (whether we do or not for cultivars, due to an international standard; see below).
    • An analogy of standardized breeds to human awards is dubious, since many other such analogies can be made that do not argue for capitalization, e.g. that acceptance into a standardized breed is comparable to citizenship (it's not "I am a Citizen of Botswana" or "She is a Tongan National"), to occupation (wrong: "I am a Dental Hygienist", despite this requiring the award of a certification), to diagnosis ("He is on the Autism Spectrum" is wrong), etc. And no one is arguing against capitalization of the titles of breed standards documents in citations, which would be done per MOS:TITLES. Our articles are about the animals, not the paperwork.
    • Also, the fact that breeds are usually treated as something automatically a matter of pedigree tells us that the exceptions are simply unusual deviations for rare contexts, not that they are meaningful to our general question.
    • Breeds are generally not like fictional creations; most of them have names that simply indicate their origin or something else descriptive about them, and/or were already in use for a more general type of animal (often a localized landrace) before the establishment of a standardized breed with the same or a derived name. Breeds are not like technical standards because they are not broadly accepted worldwide with the same definitions, but subject to continual dispute from one organization to another as to what a breed's qualities are, what its name is, and whether it is even recognized as existing, while the stylistic conventions are generally ignored outside of breeds-specific writing. Breeds are not like trademarks (except in the rare cases where one actually is trademarked), because a trademark, like a patent, is a highly specific legal category for which only certain things (not most breeds) qualify.
  • Taxonomic ranks below subspecies are not formal in zoology, but certainly informally include breeds; we know this because a) zoological literature about domesticates often refers to breeds as such and by name; b) all breeds are within (or a hybrid between) species or subspecies which have been taxonomically and genetically identified; and c) in botany (particularly horticulture), the lower taxa are formally catalogued, including forms, varieties, and cultivars, the last of which is synonymous with domestic plant breeds (some botanical literature does in fact refer to cultivars as breeds, and cultivar itself is a comparatively recent neologism).
    • Thus, any rule WP adopts (like do not capitalize) that applies to taxa below genus applies to breeds, except the specific consensus to honor the ICNCP's standard to capitalize plant cultivars (and put them in single quotes) in a scientific name (example, for an apple cultivar: Malus pumila 'Red Delicious'). That still excludes animal breeds.
    • A near-universal convention for capitalization of horticultural cultivars in formal horticultural nomenclature – but only under their "official" ICNCP cultivar names, not every vernacular name – does not generalize to a convention to always capitalize them outside that context, thus also could not logically lead us to capitalize all similar things, including domestic animal breeds.
    • Breeds are not taxa under the ICZN (or other) nomenclature. There is no external international standard for capitalization of their names.
  • Capitalization of all breed names leads to incorrect capitalization of foreign-language words and phrases in the names of breeds, in languages that do not capitalize this way; see, e.g., a large number of entries at List of chicken breeds. MOS (at MOS:TITLES, etc.) is clear that we should not impose English capitalization rules on names in other languages. [For noun-capitalizing German, a stronger anti-caps argument is that MOS:CAPS says not to capitalize unless necessary, and since English sources are not consistent about capitalizing German-derived breeds, WP should not do it. I.e., English reliable sources trump defaulting to German style; see also WP:NCCAPS#Capitalization of expressions borrowed from other languages, with a similar example about Art Nouveau vs. French art nouveau.]
  • Breeds are not proper names, any more than "mountain lion", "chief operating officers in the Australian banking industry", and "indigenous peoples of the Americas" are proper names, despite referring to clearly identifiable, unique groups. They're common-noun classifications and labels. (This would not lead to cultivars being lower-cased in scientific names, where a 'Cultivar Name'-formatted name is a symbol in a formally standardized construction, like the orthography of measurement units or chemical symbols in other technical material.)

Neutral observations about capitalization of English-language names of breeds and cultivars (under construction and open to further input):

  • Simultaneously, some regulars at WT:MOS and WT:AT have suggested that some participants in various livestock- and pet-related wikiprojects have been operating a WP:LOCALCONSENSUS against the gist of the site-wide MOS:LIFE, WP:NCCAPS, and WP:NCFAUNA guidelines, while some of the wikiproject-focused editors have accused MoS/AT/NC editors of themselves just being a local-consensus WP:CABAL. Both of these arguments essentially cancel each other out, in theory, though WP:CONLEVEL policy favors the interpretation of the MOS/AT side; Wikipedia WP:P&G pages are much more watchlisted and receive much broader input than micro-topical wikiprojects. A well advertised, site-wide RfC can settle the matter with no "consensus level" problems, and the ill will inherent in the mutually accusatory approach is unhelpful.
  • Proponents of capitalization insist that breed and cultivar names (and species names for that matter) are in fact proper names, and that any disagreement with this idea is absurd. Proponents of lower-casing are certain that capitalizers are absurdly failing to understand the linguistic and philosophical meanings of "proper name". Both of these competing ad hominem claims of the other side's ridiculousness add nothing to the discussion. That said, proponents of the proper name theory have gotten nearly no traction in this or the closely related species common name capitalization debate, and even fans of capitalization in the latter rejected this argument, preferring to simply base support for capitalizing species names on alleged standards (an argument that ultimately failed, in WP:BIRDCON, because the world has not in fact adopted the IoC naming scheme as a standard, and even if they had it would apply only to a single clade, the birds, presenting an intolerable WP:CONSISTENT problem for Wikipedia).
  • This may simply come down to whether the large percentage of a large number of general-audience sources that do not capitalize counts out to a greater number than the combination of the large percentage of a small number of specialist sources that do plus the small percentage of a large number of general-audience sources that do.

Some previous discussions of breed capitalization

Shortcut
See further down for disambiguation debates.
You may be looking for WP:BREEDCAPSRFC ( Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)/Archive 150#RfC on capitalization of the names of standardized breeds).

External sources on breeds and capitalization

  • The editors of the MLA Handbook give inconsistent advice [1]. While it leans lower-case by default except for proper names (examples provided: French bulldog, German shepherd, Irish setter, Portuguese water dog, Airedale terrier, Akita, Brittany spaniel, Labrador retriever, Lhasa apso, Doberman pinscher, Gordon setter, Jack Russell terrier, Maine coon, Texas longhorn), it then unaccountably tacks on this: "Yet other breed names are capitalized according to convention and for clarity: Old English sheepdog, Shiba Inu", which is confused and meaningless. There is no difference at all between the constructions "Shiba inu" and "Lhasa apso" (placename followed by generic non-English term for 'dog'). While "Old English" is another name for the language Anglo-Saxon, that is not the meaning here; the old English sheepdog is has nothing to do with pre-medieval English and is simply an old breed of English sheepdog. Worse, the "convention" among people who focus on breeds is in fact to capitalize all of them, always. Then MLA material ends with a recommendation to just do what dictionaries do, but we see below that dictionaries uniformly – virtually without exception – lower-case these phrases except where a proper name (or adjective derived from one) occurs. So, MLA is veering from "don't capitalize" to "maybe capitalize, inconsistently and for contradictory reasons", to "don't capitalize".
  • Daily Writing Tips [2] (a blog that is popular but of dubious reliability) addresses plant cultivars but not animal breeds: "An exception [to the general rule to lower-case all non-scientific names of organisms] is also made [in addition to that for proper names] for references to types of fruits and vegetables, such as Red Delicious apples or Early Girl tomatoes. Then there are names of cultivars, or cultivated varieties, of plants, such as that of a kind of broccoli, Brassica oleracea ‘Calabrese’. The convention in botany is to enclose the name of the cultivar in single quotation marks." This is slightly confused, because Red Delicious and Early Girl are in fact cultivar names; what's happened is that the writers didn't realize that the single-quotes convention only applies to extended scientific names, not general prose (and they didn't get the scientific name styled correctly anyway, as it should have the genus and species italicized: Brassica oleracea 'Calabrese'), and thus mistook Red Delicious for some other kind of "type" than a cultivar.
  • "English Style Guide: A handbook for authors and translators in the European Commission" (7th Ed., 2011): Gives the same advice, more correctly, with example "Camellia japonica 'Ballet Dancer'"; basically, they're just saying "do what ICNCP does".
  • "8.129 Horticultural cultivars". The Chicago Manual of Style (16th [online] ed.). U. of Chicago Pr. 2010.: Confused. Gives the same advice on plant cultivars (with examples of forms like "a Queen of the Market aster" and "cape fuchsia (Phygelius 'Salmon Leap')". Sadly it is totally useless with regard to animals at "8.128 Domestic animals and horticultural categories", as it relies upon faulty logic (by citing authorities that have nothing to do with the topic, only scientific names), and directly contradicts itself, giving both "Rhode Island Red" and "Maine coon" as examples (these must either be "Rhode Island red" and "Maine coon", or "Rhode Island Red" and "Maine Coon"; both are standardized breeds, and in precisely the same proper-name common-noun format). The "authority" they cite, the ICZN, has nothing to do with domestic animal breeds at all.
  • "U.S. Pet (Dog & Cat) Population Factsheet" (PDF). The American Humane Association (AHA). 2012. Retrieved 2013-12-17.: Doesn't capitalize. Note also use of "German shepherd dog" - very clear about perceived necessity of disambiguation. However, this is just a brochure, and may not represent how all of their material is written.
  • The Guardian and Observer Style Guide does not capitalize breed names except where they contain a proper name. See, e.g., first entry, "dachshund" in the "D" section [3].
  • Dictionaries use lower-case. Search on German shepherd, one of the most potentially ambiguous breed names (seems to refer to human sheep-herders from Germany if you don't know breed names):
    • Random House Unabridged (US) and Collins (UK), via Dictionary.com, give "German shepherd" or "German shepherd dog" (RH), and "German shepherd" (Collins) [4]
    • Merriam-Webster (US) gives "German shepherd" [5]
    • American Heritage (US) gives "German shepherd" [6]
    • Oxford (UK) gives "German shepherd" [7]
    • Cambridge (UK/US) gives "German shepherd" [8]
    • Random House (US), via TheFreeDictionary.com (also repeats AH and Collins entries) has "German shepherd" [9]
    • All major dictionaries of the English language lower-case breed names except where they contain a proper name. This can be confirmed further with the OneLook.com dictionary meta search, using additional very common multi-word breed names (it also includes hits from encyclopedias, when possible, including Encyclpaedia Britannica and Encarta): [10], [11], [12] (one capitalized hit, in Encarta encyclopedia), [13] (ditto), [14], [15], [16], [17], [18], [19], [20] (one capitalized hit in the non-notable "Infoplease Dictionary"), [21], [22], and so on. In trying various searches that produced results in most dictionaries, the only aberrant result was for Maine Coon [23], which showed two British dictionaries using "Maine Coon", apparently from lack of familiarity with coon as an American colloquial abbreviation of raccoon.
  • Google nGrams, crafted to avoid titles, headings and the beginnings of sentences [Note: These should be re-run and compared, if the corpus databases today include material newer than 2008, which they still do not as of 2018-08.]:
    • German Shepherd vs. German shepherd: Lower case preferred by 2:1 to 3.3:1 ratio. [24] [25] [26] [27] [28]
    • Golden Retriever vs. golden retriever: Lower case preferred by a 2:1 to 4:1 ratio, other than an odd capitalization spike around 1998, according to some of the data. [29] [30] [31] [32] [33]
    • Maine Coon vs. Maine coon: Upper case preferred by a 1.1:1 to 3:1 ratio, other than a pro-lower-case reversal in the 1990s according to some of the data [34] [35] [36] [37]
  • When isolating breed names with made-up (hyper-compounded) words in them, capitalization is more common:
    • "American Shorthair" is more common than American shorthair by a widely variable margin (some years as high as 7:1 but more recently narrowing to 2:1). [38] [39]
    • "British shorthair": no hits in Google's book data. [40] [41], despite the British Shorthair being the most popular cat breed in the UK.
    • Similar but less marked results for "Japanese Bobtail" over "Japanese bobtail", again narrowing to a much closer margin in recent years: [42]
  • When the names are capitalized, Ngrams including animal type following breed name show that the type is generally only capitalized when it is required for ambiguity reasons in the name:
    • "Norwegian Forest Cat" dwarfs "Norwegian Forest cat" [43] (but see "Norwegian forest cat", below). Rare breeds like this are hardly ever mentioned except in specialist literature, which uniformly capitalizes, so this does not actually tell us anything about mainstream usage. It does tell us that the animal type is formally part of the name where it is required to avoid high levels of ambiguity (the animal is a cat, not a Scandinavian woodland). This is borne out by looking at standards themselves; both the Norwegian Forest Cat and the American Quarter Horse (which is not a coin) have those as their formal, standardized name, despite the fact that the Siamese cat, Holsteiner horse, etc., etc., do not contain "Cat" or "Horse" in their names (WP just includes them where necessary as disambiguation).
    • "Manx Cat" doesn't occur at all in recent books. [44]
    • Same goes for "Alsatian Dog". [45]
    • "Siamese Cat" is also almost unheard of: [46]
  • Highly ambiguous names tend to be capitalized more often, but this is not even a predictable effect:
    • "American Quarter Horse" beats out "American quarter horse" by a 3:1 to 9:1 margin depending on year. [47]
    • Norwegian Forest cat vs. Norwegian forest cat: Lower case preferred by a widely variable margin, and a late-1990s spike in preference of upper case [48], which coincides with the launch of several additional cat-fancier magazines, part of the sharp increase in specialty pet publications in this era (which could at least theoretically influence mainstream news publishing, and clearly do influence online publishing in the topic area).
  • Some other points of interest:
    • German [S|s]hepherd dog vs. Alsatian dog: The GSD forms (when combined) have outpaced the AD form, but it has had periods of dominance (ca. 1925–40, 1950–60, and a blip around 1968–9) [49]. Results on ambiguous phrases like "German shepherd" and "Alsatian" alone are iffy. However, the low level of ambiguity of "German [S|s]hepherd" (how often do Deutsche sheep-herders get written about?) vs. "Alsatian" probably means that "German [S|s]hepherd" with or without "dog" has actually been dominant over "Alsatian" since ca. 1939 [50].
    • There does seem to be slight tendency to capitalize the German breed names in English, influenced by the capitalize-all-nouns rule in the German language, but it's not consistent or strong. E.g. "Doberman[n] Pinscher" has lost its lead over "Doberman[n] pinscher" (the first part is a proper noun, and correctly spelled Dobermann, and often used without "pinscher", so "dobermann pinscher" and "doberman pinscher" are wrong), and the both-words-capitalized version had been the minority usage at times, including as recently as ca. 1990 [51]. Since around 2008, the both-capitalized and only-Doberman[n]-capitalized versions have been very close in frequency. The intentional misspelling "Doberman" was invented by the American Kennel Club and should be avoided except in a specifically AKC context. [I suppose one could view it like the difference between "Ockham" and "Occam" (as in William of, and his metaphoric razor), though without centuries of history to back the variant spellings. The inventor of this breed was a known person, who spelled his name Dobermann.]
    • Lower-case "dachshund" has always dwarfed "Dachshund", however [52] [53].
  • These (and similar searches on other German breed names) indicate two things: a) People are not actually confused by some breed names being capitalized as (or containing) proper names then others being lower case, since non-Germans generally have no idea whether "Dachs", etc., are proper names unless they've checked; b) the only confusion that seems to result is that when one part of a name is capitalized as a proper name, people aren't always sure whether to capitalize the rest of it, thus sometimes leaning toward "Doberman Pinscher" vs. "Doberman pinscher", even if they would normally write "dachshund". Professionally written sources generally seem to take the time to find out whether a German name element is a proper name or not, and do not blindly apply German noun capitalization to English usage of breed names, but they may continue capitalizing after they've started sometimes, out of uncertainty what to do with such a name. When no part of the name is a proper name, the capitalization is studiously avoided entirely [54], etc., even when part of the name could be suspected by someone who didn't check to be a proper name, as in "springer spaniel". [55] and "cocker spaniel" [56] (neither of these are the human surnames Springer and Cocker, but refer to the activities of the dog).
    • Capitalization of obscure breeds (Affenpinscher, etc.) is more common, when they show up in N grams at all, because most published references to them are in specialist (pro-capitalization) works, not general-audience ones. For better-known breeds, the exact opposite pattern is true. [57], [58], [59], [60], etc.
  • None of this means that the capitalization is entirely in specialist publications; a quick search of Google News (e.g. for "cocker spaniel" [61]) disproves that, though lower case dominates, especially in newspapers. Still, as of 2015-11-15, one of the first-page results was a newspaper using "Cocker Spaniel".
  • The "keep capitalizing if the first part was capitalized" issue, curiously, does not appear to arise with species names, only breeds: [62], [63]
    • Capitalization rates increase if specialist literature tends to favor species capitalization, as in ornithological and British botanical publications, since a) many such specialized sources are indexed by Google nGrams, and b) their style has an effect when those works are used as sources for non-specialized material ("I'm just writing it the way the experts did"): [64]. Even so, the majority usage clearly remains lower-case.
    • The same "breeds are somehow different on this matter" effect is also seen in other constructions. One might expect an aggrandizing and potentially ambiguous name in the form "[g/G]reat s/Something" to show a strong shift toward capitalization (e.g. through the influence of "Great Britain", etc.), but this only happens with breeds, including very popular ones that are frequently written about in non-specialized works, when compared to wild species about which there is also notable public interest that verges on fandom: [65]

Natural disambiguation pro and con

Wikipedia policies and guidelines

Arguments for natural disambiguation (under construction and open to further input)

  • WP:NATURALDIS policy (part of WP:Article titles directs us to prefer natural disambiguation over parenthetic, comma-separated, and descriptive disambiguation.
  • WP:COMMONNAME policy prefers that we use the common name, disambiguated if necessary, though an alternative name can be considered.
  • Even various opponents of the naturally disambiguated names have suggested that it really constitutes an alternative name not a disambiguation, but an alternative name would be permissible anyway, and this kind of alternative name happens to coincide with parenthetic disambiguation, so it is likely to be the best possible alternative name in most cases (possible exceptions would be rare, e.g. "Alsatian" for "German Shepherd", but also themselves usually need disambiguation).
  • The "Foo (species)" format is used almost entirely for notable individual animals (see many hundreds of articles categorized under Category:Individual horses, Category:Individual dogs; thus a name like Billy (dog) for a breed is itself ambiguous and confusing. A disambiguation that simply leads to another ambiguity is a failure.
  • WP:Requested moves consensus (see Some previous discussions of breed disambiguation) has consistently and overwhelmingly favored natural disambiguation.
  • Except in cases where the breed name already includes the species name or a synonym of it (e.g. -hound for dog), there are essentially zero cases in which a name of the form Breed Name species is not WP:RECOGNIZABLE and WP:PRECISE, even to breeders (in contexts where they need to clarify and the short form would be ambiguous). Some N grams [66]: Even "poodle dog" has been well-attested in print since the early 1800s, and "German shepherd dog" (more so than its alternative "Alsatian dog").

Arguments against natural disambiguation (under construction and open to further input)

  • Natural disambiguation often results in constructions that, while attested, are not the most common among specialists or even in general [Note: This is because the shorter, more common ones are ambiguous, so this is effectively circular reasoning, since it was the ambiguity that lead us to consider any form of disambiguation at all.]
  • Many breeds have an alternative name that can be used instead. [Note: This argument generally fails under WP:COMMONNAME policy, and often under WP:USEENGLISH since most of the alt. names are in other languages and rarely used, if at all, in English.]
  • If the common name is "Ragdoll" not "Ragdoll cat" (an alternative, longer name, not a disambiguation), we must use "Ragdoll" per WP:COMMONNAME then apply a parenthetical disambiguation, thus "Ragdoll (cat)". [Note: This is faulty wikilawyering, factually wrong in several ways. It is perfectly permissible under WP:AT to use a common-enough alternative name if the most common one is ambiguous; we consider this before even applying WP:AT#DAB disambiguation rules. When we do get to those, there is no requirement to use parenthetical; it is only one of several approaches, and the policy-preferred one is natural disambiguation, which is, necessarily, what "Ragdoll cat" is.]

Neutral observations about capitalization of English-language names of breeds and cultivars (under construction and open to further input)

  • Some of the more vocal participants in one wikiproject, WP:DOGS, have suggested they have a legitimate WP:LOCALCONSENSUS there to use parenthetic disambiguation for dog breeds, despite WP:NATURAL policy and WP:DAB guideline. [Note: An examination of its talk page archives turns up no such consensus discussion, only some complaints about whether some articles should have been moved without the project's input, and the LOCALCONSENSUS (a.k.a. WP:CONLEVEL) policy makes it clear that wikiprojects cannot make up rules that contradict site-wide policy, so this argument would appear to be moot.]
  • At the same time, some of these same wikiproject people have accused AT/DAB/NC editors of themselves just being an illegitimate local-consensus WP:CABAL. Both of these arguments essentially cancel each other out, in theory, though WP:CONLEVEL policy favors the interpretation of the AT/DAB side. A well advertised, site-wide RfC can settle the matter with no "consensus level" problems (to the extent that a long series of RMs has not already settled it), and the ill will inherent in the mutually accusatory approach is unhelpful.
  • Natural disambiguation can produce poor results, if WP:CONCISE is not also followed, e.g. "American Game breed of chickens" when "American Game chicken" or (more conventionally for game poultry breeds) the present naturally disambiguated title " American Game fowl" will suffice.

Montanabw summed up the issue pretty well in January 2015, on distinguishing between Mustang horses and other things named "Mustang": "We have a[n article about the] Shetland pony, which within the pony world is commonly called a "Shetland", likewise, within the horse world, we have "Mustangs" "Arabians" "Hanoverians" and so on. Outside of the horse world, any rational person will clarify an " Arabian horse" or a " Hanoverian horse" so as to be clear where we are talking about a horse or not." [67]

Some previous discussions of breed disambiguation

Shortcut
These discussions follow a similar debate pattern on WP as those involving capitalization of breed and species common names. Lots of specialized-style fallacy and WP:IDONTLIKEIT stuff, versus WP:CONSISTENT, WP:NATURALDIS and other actual policy-based arguments.

Some previous discussions on breed names and WP:USEENGLISH

Incomplete; just started this section.

Some previous discussions of merging, deleting, or properly naming "pseudo-breeds"

Incomplete; just started this section

We've long had a problem with editors (many of whom really know better) intentionally conflating breeds, crossbreeds, hybrids, coat-color varieties, feral populations, and numerous other things all under the magical word " breed", as redefined by them on-the-fly to basically mean "anything I want to be a breed is a breed". This seem to be a mixture of promotionalism, an excuse to over-capitalize, fancruft, ignorance of WP:Notability or WP:No original research, and PoV-pushing (e.g. against or in favor of particular breeder organizations and their terms).

Capitalization of common names of species – an eight-year, site-wide dispute

Shortcut

BIRDCON – the RfC that brought it to a close

  • Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Archive 156#Bird common name decapitalisation ( WP:BIRDCON), 2014-04-06 – 2014-05-01, RfC closed by neutral admin accepted by both sides; closed in favor of lower case with detailed list of rationales for doing so. Began as a discussion of a proposal, which turned into a poorly structured but well-enough attended straw poll. It showed little support for capitalization, despite proven WP:MEATPUPPETtry; it lists a preponderance of reliable, general-audience sources being against the practice (for those who feel that MOS should rely on them rather than do what consensus agrees is best for the encyclopedia). This !vote reversal kind of says it all.

Post-RfC cleanup

Even as late as 2016, there are still, throughout Wikipedia, frequent cases of capitalization of the common names of species, including mammals.

  • In late 2014, SMcCandlish cleaned up a large number of cases of this, among both primates and felines, but only in a few genus and species articles. No telling how many more of them there are.
  • Examples like this rodent case are all over the place. Another, uncovered shortly after that one. A marsupial one turned up as recently as December 2016 [69].
  • As of early 2015, progress on decapitalization of vernacular names of birds was proceeding slowly, but with the labor of various editors, some MoS regulars, others just wikignomes. Some participants of WP:BIRDS were helping, most were not. The wikiproject's more vocal participants tended to be divided along two contradictory lines: harassing editors who had supported lower case for not doing all the cleanup work by themselves, and attacking the editors doing the cleanup work for actually doing it. Both basically amount to sour-grapes belligerence with regard to lower-casing. SMcCandlish noted: 'I don't like being berated, especially in a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" scenario, so I eventually bailed on the effort and went back to mammals. The WP:OWNers win again. [sigh].'
  • "Cat", "Domestic Cat", etc., found still capitalized at Lists of cats in August 2016. [70]
  • Template claiming "IOC World Bird Names ... is the de facto naming standard within the Wikiproject:Birds" was still appearing in about 30 articles; deleted at TfD in November 2018.

Prior state of policies and guidelines (up to April 2014)

This was a then-current record of disruption happening at WP:P&G pages and attempts to resolve and clean up.
  • WP:MOS#LIFE ( MOS:LIFE): Wikipedia:Manual of Style#Animals, plants, and other organisms – Old news: Since 2012 (based on earlier but less clear 2008 wording), it said plainly to not capitalize common names of organisms, but observed without endorsing it that there was a pro-caps "local consensus" conflict regarding birds; and to not apply the capitalization elsewhere. This was being miscast as a "birds exception" by WP:BIRDS, and in turn being used as an excuse to demand more "exceptions" for insects and plants.
  • MOS:CAPS: Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Capital letters#Animals, plants, and other organisms – Old news: Conflicted with MOS since 2012-01-05; was wishywashy, wrongly saying WP:BIRDS is an "exception" to MOS. It was largely cleaned up to agree with MOS:LIFE as of 2012-02-29. But as of 2014, it was severely out-of-line with MOS and flagged as disputed, especially for adding a new "exception" to capitalize some insect categories when there isn't even a consensus to do so at the projects in question.
  • WP:NCCAPS: Wikipedia:Naming conventions (capitalization)#Organisms – Old news: As of early 2014-04, NCCAPS grossly diverged from MOS:LIFE, and didn't even match WP:NCFAUNA and WP:NCFLORA; falsely promoted WP:BIRDS#Naming as a "guideline" (this was removed in mid 2014-04). All of these defects have been corrected, and it now simply links to the actual guidelines and very concisely and accurately summarizes them, as of 2014-04-15
  • WP:NCFAUNA: Wikipedia:Naming conventions (fauna)#Capitalisation and italicisation, with only 58 watchers [71] – Old news: Conflicted with MOS:LIFE as of 2012-01-05, saying projects could make exceptions, in contradiction of WP:LOCALCONSENSUS; largely cleaned up to agree with MOS:LIFE as of 2012-02-27; formerly part of WP:AT (then WP:NC), before split off; as of early 2014, it was modified without consensus to be favorable to bird capitalization, and this has been reverted as of 2014-04-04)
  • WP:NCFLORA: Wikipedia:Naming conventions (flora) – Old news: Conflicted with MOS:LIFE since 2012-01-05, saying there was no consensus for no-caps default, but there has in fact been one at MOS since at least 2008; many other problems. Analysis, much less fixing, not really begun in earnest. Subject to disputes as of 2014-04-05.

Manual of Style – relevant major changes

  • The present wording was put up on 2012-04-15. It is much less favorable toward WP:BIRDS than SMcCandlish's earlier draft, but represents consensus at that time, after a very protracted and heated debate (including blatant canvassing, poll disruption, false polling and dispute resolution sabotage by a WP:BIRDS member, detailed with links here. The wording is a "keep the peace" temporary compromise that pays a small amount of lip service to WP:BIRDS just to reduce strife enough that consensus becomes clearer eventually, to identify the WP:BIRDS practice as a WP:LOCALCONSENSUS problem not an exception, and to "wall off" their practice and keep it from spreading. Two years later, no one has made even the slightest headway toward gaining an actual consensus on Wikipedia to capitalize bird (or any other) species common names, and in fact the opposite has happened, e.g. with some WP:RM cases closing with consensus to move bird articles to lower case, long discussions on guideline pages in which pro-caps editors have a hard time defending their reasoning, etc. The game is over, but some of the players won't leave the field.
  • SMcCandlish's 2012-01-05 WP:BOLD attempt to resolve problems with that version; reverted (as expected), but led to a month-long discussion, and eventually, in April 2012, the current version of the MOS language, which is even less conciliatory toward WP:BIRDS ("oops")
  • A very problematic version existed for some time, in which MOS crazily deferred to a wikiproject advice page as if it were a policy. Basically, no one noticed or cared for a long time, until after objections in 2010 and 2011 did not resolve the matter, a broader discussion happened in 2012.
  • There was no consensus at all at MOS on the matter back in late 2006 to early 2007 (checking the timeline of the debate elsewhere, it's because WP:BIRDS members were actively proselytizing capitalization to other projects, with absurd results (e.g. various groups of mammal articles started getting capitalization despite this violating real-world nomenclature conventions for mammals)

2014 discussions on species capitalization

Previous Wikipedia-wide discussions

WP:Arbitration Committee cases

  • Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Article titles and capitalisation a.k.a. WP:ARBATC (Jan.–March 2012) – Was not about organisms, but concluded that WP:CONSENSUS demands a high standard for consensus to change policies and guidelines, and warned various parties for incivility and disruptive editing with regard to WP:AT/ WP:MOS matters.
  • Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration/Date delinking a.k.a. WP:RFAR/DDL (Jan.–June 2009; amended 2010, 2011) – Was not about organisms, but concluded against WP:FAITACCOMPLI actions to evade consensus by making it "too late" to do anything about one side's favored outcome; also establishes equal treatment of "gnoming" and other editorial contributions that aren't direct content creation; also establishes that it is not okay to revert-war between two styles that are both acceptable.
  • Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration#misapplication of WP:BIRD, only available in edit history (2–4 March 2008) – ArbCom declined to take the case, as a content dispute. An interesting read anyway; the party mostly responsible for trying to spread "birdcaps" to mammals and other articles got taken to ArbCom, and responses (on the capitalization question) varied between the views that a) it's an MoS issue to disxuss there, b) it's definitely not proper English, c) not sure, and d) it is proper English. Well, we all know how that went, ultimately. It's especially noteworthy that MOS:LIFE already, by this point, said to use lower case for species common names, but some people from one wikiproject were still editwarring to capitalize them, even for unrelated things like felines.

Wikiproject discussions, proposals, and essays

WP:WikiProject Tree of Life

WP:WikiProject Animals

  • Wikipedia:WikiProject Animals/Draft capitalization guidelines (1 September 2010 – 21 December 2011) and Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Animals/Draft capitalization guidelines (5 January 2011 – 5 January 2012, and some followup on 6 April 2014) – Crucial piece, demonstrating the confusion level of "our wikiproject is going to make up whatever it wants" chaos directly engendered by WP:NCCAPS saying they could do that. This was a failed proposal to establish essentially random wikiproject capitalization "rules", against MOS:LIFE's wording since 2008 (and superseded more explicitly by MOS:LIFE revisions in 2012, 2014). Even as late as 2011, virtually every biology project was inventing its own. One interesting part is that, despite most input being canvassed directly from wikiprojects, studiously avoiding notifying WT:MOS, WT:MOSCAPS, or WT:NCFAUNA and WT:NCFLORA, the idea of capitalizing flying insects did not gain consensus, despite later claims to the contrary (see the talk thread "Consensus seems to have been reached" for details, which in short were: capitalize birds and domestic breeds). This mess and its eventual rejection is incontrovertible evidence that the "MOS cannot be applied across the board or things will break" claim, trying to give WP:BIRDS a special exemption from 2008 to 2014, was nonsense and that the opposite was true. When MOS settled unequivocally on a single, lower-cased standard in April 2012, all of these projects (that were still active) fell in line with MOS on this, with no dispute, no editorial strikes and walkouts and other WP:DIVA crap, no reader and editor confusion, no canvassing and poll falsification and asking the other parent; no problems of any kind. All, that is, except WP:BIRDS.

WP:WikiProject Plants

WP:WikiProject Mammals

WP:WikiProject Amphibians and Reptiles

WP:WikiProject Birds

  • Birds in bird-related articles were mostly referred to by capitalized names, mostly following IOC's particular rules; but this is only because the wikiproject WP:OWNed them to stay this way, a constant "maintenance" effort, against the efforts of others editors to lower-case them.
  • Wikipedia:WikiProject Birds#Bird names and article titles ( WP:BIRDS#Naming) [ diff, 3 May 2014]: The wikiproject essay that was the principal source of all this strife. Advanced as a "guideline" by its proponents, it is really just wikiproject advice. It declared IOC the standard, and said to use capitalization (and not only for IOC names, but all common names of bird species). SMcCandlish helped overhaul this section, in a process that was unusually collaborative given the previous conflicts between that project and editor. The earlier version was a real mess. It later was changed to remove the capitalization stuff, after the WP:BIRDCON RfC.
  • Wikipedia:WikiProject Birds/References – Another wikiproject advice page on taxonomic and other references. Claims "the de facto standard for Wikipedia bird articles is the IOC World Bird List, (Currently version 5.2). This is preferred for all articles, although exceptions may be made in particular cases", but WP:COMMONNAME policy and the rest of the WP:CRITERIA for article titles of course trump this. In actual practice, the IOC names are usually converged on as the WP titles anyway, since most of the IOC's names are also the most common names used in reliable sources. It's unclear why WP:BIRDS insists on trying to declare they have a standard they can make other editors use, but it's probably best to cite WP:DGAF and forget about it. At this point, no one takes these "we have our own rules" assertions seriously. Still, it's frustrating to be a participant in this project yet have no ability to dissuade it from heavy-handed tactics like this.
2015
2014
This was a really busy year
  • Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Birds/Archive 67#Revisions and WP:BIRDCON 8 August 2014 – same anon as above attacks someone trying to comply with WP:BIRDCON as "destroy[ing] the work of others", and vents about "Cap Warriors".
  • Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Birds/Archive 67#WP Birds template as seen on talk pages 13 August 2014 – project member proposes WP:POINTy campaign to post protest messages on all the bird article talk pages. Another project participant wisely says "Let's not flog a dead horse."
  • Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Birds/Archive 67#Revisions and WP:BIRDCON October 2014 – Very interesting discussion, entirely among the bird regulars. Clearly indicates that several of them don't see it as a big deal, e.g. 'It's not really a matter of one way or other being "correct" (though we birders are certainly more used to uppercase names and the MOS boffins are more used to lowercase), it's just a matter of style. ... But we can all certainly adapt to whichever style is "acceptable" to the community.', with repeated calls to sticking to content creation instead of creating more strife. There is general agreement to try to reverse WP:BIRDCON at some point, amid some WP:GREATWRONGS-style ranting, that makes the same invalid arguments that have been refuted again and again whenever the issue comes up. The weirdest thing is this error: "Elsewhere [i.e., not style matters] in Wikipedia primary sources are the best choices for citations." That's not true at all, as even a cursory read of WP:RS makes clear. WP relies primarily on secondary sources, only permits "with caution" use of primary sources for certain kinds of things.
  • Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Birds/Archive 67#English name vs. Scientific name July 2014 – Some participants in that project still seem unclear that WP:COMMONNAME is a policy, not optional, and think that IOC's bird list is some Wikipedia standard to follow. Others point out that IOC's list isn't even as current as some others, and another suggests, about the specific cases at issue, that they scientific names are in fact the most common, so should be the names of the articles (which was the status quo with them; as of June 2015 one of the two is at the binomial, the other at the not-actually-common vernacular name.
  • WT:BIRDS and its archives newer than 61 have not been fully examined yet; some of the discussions listed immediately below may have already been archived.
  • Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Birds/Archive_67#Revisions and WP:BIRDCON 17 February 2014 – WP:BIRDS regulars confirm they're still active, despite some people quitting over the capitalization debate. Someone does not resist temptation to name-call those who disagreed with them "bullies", though a look through what is collected here so far indicates that the real browbeating has been coming, year after year, from this wikiproject, not from outside it.
  • Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Birds/Archive 66#Bird article name (capitalisation) March 2014 – Long series of discussions about the WP:RM at Talk:Crowned crane, that lead to a WP:MR, and eventually to the WP:BIRDCON RfC. Some valid procedural points were raised about the original RM, but these don't invalidate the later RfC. How we got to having an RfC (a long-running and very detailed one, with a very precise, well-reasoned close) is irrelevant. A consensus discussion can get started for any reason at all.
  • Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Birds/Archive 66#Bird common name decapitalisation May 2014 – Actual work to implement the changes approved at WP:BIRDCON demonstrated that, despite all the hair-pulling about capitalization of bird names being "correct", the WP:BIRDS project was not consistently applying the capitalization they were fighting so hard for. Even at a well-developed article like Red-tailed hawk, all of the following appeared in the middles of various sentences: Red-tailed Hawk, Red-Tailed Hawk, Red Tailed Hawk, red-tailed hawk, Red Tail Hawk, Red-tail, red-tail, Red-tailed, redtail. Among other errors and inconsistencies. So much for the fantasy story of evil-bad MOS style warriors destroying a great tradition of WP:BIRDS editors following a style rule that only idiots would defy. What WP:BIRDCON has actually done is actually result in normalization to something consistent, at all, of any kind, where before was random chaos.
  • Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Birds/Archive 66#IAR May 2014 – A bird editor says they simply will not comply with WP:BIRDCON. Someone else cites WP:POINT, etc., at them. WP:IAR actually allows you to write as you will, if complying with some nit-pick style rule interferes with your ability to get on with creating content. But IAR doesn't allow you to revert other people complying with MOS. Civil and productive discussion, actually, until someone hiding behind an IP address trips over Godwin's law and calls MOS editors "Grammer Nazis" (yes, they actually misspelled "grammar"), and says "Time to take the Bird Pages to a separate WIKI" (yes, they actually capitalized like that). Also, a self-contradictory view is given that it's wrong to have singled out birds and not also change style for some other categories, yet they must get on the warpath and make sure "MOS fanatics" can "impose their little power trips elsewhere on WP". Who's being fanatical again?
  • Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Birds/Archive 66#I'm out July 2014 – A bird editor says he's quitting over the decapitalization, and like so many other participants in this project before (for several years now) is sure that they all really need to jump ship to a better, bird-specific wiki because Wikipedia is a lost cause. That's a general condemnation of the project, not a disagreement over a style matter. This thread includes lots more false-accusation attacks from various parties (all against MOS editors): "Fundamental dogma", "jackboots approach" (see Godwin's law again), "harrassment of content editors", etc. The "resigned" editor actually still comes back regularly (as of June 2015) as an IP, just to post more personal attacks, which is just WP:TROLLing, an abuse of WP talk pages. Worst of all, someone posts a crazy conspiracy theory, that MOS editors (characterized as "some of the most zealous style-over-substance supporters" of course) "may well be long-term detractors of Wikipedia whose main aim is perhaps to destroy the long-term editor-base." Same editor also blatantly lies: "some of the main detractors [of the capitalization] are opposed to the fact that specialists contribute to Wikipedia."; and then continues with a second conspiracy theory about a "brigade" against "substantial authors" on some other trivial style point that some wikiproject wants to edit-war about. The sick thing is that the poster of all this wacky-attacky nonsense is an admin.
  • Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Birds/Archive 66#Southern boobook (Ninox boobook) June–July 2014 – Yet again, someone from this wikiproject says "We take the IOC world list as our standard." Well, Wikipedia takes WP:COMMONNAME policy as its standard. The names coincide anyway about 99.5% of the time, but that's not the point. This "we, the sovereign nation of WP:BIRDS, declare our own standard and ignore Wikipedia policy" nonsense has to stop.
  • Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Birds/Archive 66#So long, and thanks for all the fish (May–July 2014) – Someone who had already left Wikipedia about a year earlier heard about WP:BIRDCON and came back to announce (more civilly that the one above) some kind of re-resignation over the matter, but thought that the result was inevitable anyway. Despite being frequently held up by capitalizers as someone "driven off" the project by "style warriors", this editor a) had other reasons for leaving already, and b) has actually returned as of May 2015, anyway. The third in the Triumvirate Who Quit also resigns in this same thread, without any particular drama. Has sporadically returned, e.g. in October 2014 and February 2015. An unintentionally funny reference is made to tall poppy syndrome, as in "we're being cut down because others are jealous of our superior work", when it often has a very different meaning, relating to negative public reaction to "the affront committed by anyone who starts to put on superior airs". Best comment ever, after someone attacks people for making the changes (after earlier attacking them for not being willing to do the work to make the changes): "I don't care about capitalisation at all actually, I'm merely saving others from burning out on such a massive task. Do keep casting aspersions though." Exactly. It's not about writing content, or getting facts right, it's just about lashing out self-contradictorily at random because they didn't end up WP:WINNING a very WP:LAME fight they spent 8 or so years over-investing energy in. No wonder a few of them feel they need extended wikibreaks. Oh, and the same thread makes the false claim that a fourth editor quit, but he didn't; continued posting in that very thread, and has been active well into mid-2015.
  • Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Birds/Archive 66#Consensus July 2014 – Someone canvasses WP:BIRDS to come to ANI and complain about SMcCandlish personally, on totally unrelated issues. And of course a bunch of them did.
  • Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Birds/Archive 66#Bird names in lower case May–August 2014 – Well-reasoned comments by the WP:BIRDCON closing admin, and others, are met with the same scapegoating and personal attacks as usual, this time commingling entirely unrelated matters (me personally moving some articles without discussion that turned out to be controversial moves, vs. the community deciding in a very long RfC to not capitalize species names). It's completely irrational.
  • Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Birds#Locked Pages V (2nd req) ( diff) 2012-02 (regular editor of articles on Australian birds disagrees with imposition of IOC bird names, suggesting a lack of consensus on the issue; discussion continued at User talk:Bidgee#IOC Bird names)
  • Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Birds/Archive 65#Capitalisation issues again 2 March 2014 – Revert-warring to force upper case, and insistence that their WP:PROJPAGE at WP:BIRDS#Naming is a "guideline".
  • Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Birds/Archive 65##Move discussion about bird species name (capitalization, hyphenation) 12 March 2014 – Notification of the WP:RM discussion at Talk:Crowned crane. This is the turning point. The "we know better than you rubes" attitude the WP:BIRDS people brought to this RM and the WP:MR that followed it, and so on, contributed strongly to the community rejecting their arguments and concluding to downcase bird species common names two months later in WP:BIRDCON.
  • Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Birds/Archive 65#Question on common name capitalization April 2014 – insisting on capitalizing non-IOC names undermines WP:BIRDS' basis/excuse for the IOC capitalization, which is that "IOC is a special and different case"; this argument was ignored. A month later they all got lower-cased. Interesting. It was not the main deciding factor, but it sure didn't help. Lesson: Do not ignore the logic in an argument because you've had previous disagreements with, or just don't like, the person making it.
2012–2013
Another very busy period. Hint: When this many editors dispute a "rule" this much, it does not have consensus.
2011 and earlier

WP:WikiProject Cephalopods

WP:WikiProject Cetaceans

WP:WikiProject Fishes

WP:WikiProject Monotremes and Marsupials

WP:WikiProject Primates

WP:WikiProject Rodents

  • [Rodents are all now referred to by lower case names, unless some capitalization has been missed in article text.]
  • Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Rodents/Archive 1#Capitalisation (17 January – 13 February 2010, followup 30 January 2011) – Concluded (independently of MOS:LIFE) to use lower case, because the journal and other professional literature on rodents usually does so.

Article- and user-level discussions of note

Only a very small percentage of these debates have been identified and listed here yet. Some may have moved to talk archive pages.

External sources on species

Nomeclature codes, standards, and sciences-wide guidelines

  • The International Code of Nomenclature for algae, fungi, and plants. Intl. Botanical Congress, Intl. Assn. for Plant Taxonomy. 2011. "Preface". (formerly Intl. Code of Botanical Nom.): "[T]ypography is a matter of editorial style and tradition not of nomenclature." Doesn't cover animals, of course, but this is a general statement about style in nomenclature, not a statement about plants in particular.
  • International Code of Zoological Nomenclature – does not use the capitalization and does not recommend for or against it.
  • [Need to add IOC World Bird List on capitalization]
  • IOC World Bird List, "Patronyms and Accents" ver 4.1, access date 14 April 2014 – clear proof that IOC does what it thinks is most convenient for its audience. This is section is a crucial window into how IOC operates and why its style rules cannot be adopted here: The IOC's rationales given for dropping diacritics (what it incorrectly calls "accent marks") have already been thoroughly rejected at WP:DIACRITICS and MOS:DIACRITICS. They're also based on linguistic claims that are absurdly false, e.g. "correct pronunciation [is] the sole purpose of using accents in local languages of the world".

N-grams Care must be taken to eliminate as much as possible any usages where capitalization is done for formatting reasons, e.g. in titles and in headings. The main way to do this is to search for phrases with lower-case but trivial words included: a blue jay,a Blue Jay, then the blue jay,the Blue Jay, and of blue jays,of Blue Jays. Most of the Google ngram advanced search tools are useless in this regard; e.g., the _DET_ blue jay,_DET_ Blue Jay to return assorted determiner (a/an, the, this, that, those, etc.) matches cannot distinguish case, and the blue jay _END_,Blue Jay _END_ search to only return results from ends of "sentences" interprets all titles and headings as if sentences. It must be done with specific lower-case words like "a"/"an", "the" and "of". Most trailing-word searches like blue jay nest,Blue Jay nest are not productive, or not enough to be statistically significant when they return any results at all, which is rarely. Possessives have to be excluded because the construction "the Someone's something" is rarely used, meanwhile the "a/an" and "of" cases aren't statistically significant enough by themselves.

It also must be noted that virtually all field guides capitalize all species, and many other specialist publications do as well, which strongly skews the numbers upward for capitalization (i.e., the capitalization figures would be much lower if such works could be excluded and the ngrams only run against general-audience publications). Nevertheless, most search results strongly favor lower case anyway; this unquestionably dispels any notion that capitalization of common names of species is normal outside of specialist publications.

Birds: Here are the top 10 American bird species by both frequency of sightings and largest populations, with the lists merged (they had duplicate entries), and minus "mallard", which is used in too many other contexts to be certain that the results were mostly for the duck species as such. [93]

American bird ngrams
  • "American Crow" vs "American crow": Inconsistent results, some for upper case, some for lower, but perhaps an edge to upper, probably because of the ambiguity (the American crow species vs. crows in the US or the Americas more broadly). [94] [95] [96]
  • "Northern Cardinal" vs. "northern cardinal": Lower case throughout the 1990s, then a sudden spike for upper case. [97] [98] [99]
  • "Dark-eyed Junco" vs. "dark-eyed Junco": Lower case. [100] [101]
  • "Mourning Dove" vs "mourning dove": Lower case. [102] [103] [104]
  • "Downy Woodpecker" vs. "downy woodpecker": Lower case. [105] [106] [107] (some data suggests a late-1990s capitalization spike)
  • "American Goldfinch" vs. "American goldfinch": Lower case. [108] [109] [110] (slight increase in capitalization in the late 1990s)
  • "Blue Jay" vs. "blue jay": Lower case. [111] [112] [113] (Note: This result is even with probably false positives for capitalization due to the sports team.)
  • "Black-capped Chickadee" vs. "black-capped chickadee": Lower case. [114] [115]
  • "House Finch" vs. "house finch": Lower case. [116] [117] [118] (some evidence of a capitalization spike in the early 2000s)
  • "Tufted Titmouse" vs. "tufted titmouse": Lower case. [119] [120] [121] [122]
  • "European Starling" vs. "European starling": Lower case. [123] [124] [125]
  • "American Robin" vs. "American robin": Mixed usage. [126] [127] [128] (Note: Some capitalization hits are probably for other phrases, e.g. "an American Robin Hood", "the American Robin Tunney", etc.)
  • "Common Grackle" vs. "common grackle": Mixed usage, but more lower than upper case. [129] [130] [131] (Note: This data is actually strongly skewed in favor of capitalization, because mostly only birder sources, which capitalize, use the full name of this bird; general sources will mostly simply say "grackle" by itself, dropping "common". This is actually true of a lot of the "American" cases, too. The fact that usage is not strongly in favor of capitalization in these cases is very telling: Even with every field guide in publication adding to the capitalization pile and fewer-than-normal non-birder sources for balance, there's still not strong showing of capitalization.)
  • "Canada Goose" vs. "Canada goose": Lower case. [132] [133] [134]
  • "Red-winged Blackbird" vs. "red-winged blackbird": Lower case. [135] [136] [137] (This is a crucial case, since the raison d'etre of the capitalization is that supposedly names like this will be just too terribly ambiguous and confuse people into thinking it means "blackbirds of any species that happen to have red wings" unless it's capitalized. Well, the sky did not fall, and people are not capitalizing this, and that's all there is to it.
  • "Snow Goose" vs. "snow goose": Lower case. [138] [139] [140] (This and several others here show that when "the" is prepended, the capitalization goes up a little, because we're getting hits from more field guides and other birder works that put "the" in front of species names, e.g. "The principal diet of the Snow Goose is..." vs. more typical mainstream hit like "It looked like a snow goose".)

The British top 10 with multi-word names (i.e., excluding "starling", "magpie", "robin", etc.; these one-word common names hit too many things other than the particular species, and most of the list were like that), [141], plus more from the top-10 British winter list (to make up for so many one-word-named ones) [142] and more from another site on British garden birds [143]:

British bird ngrams
  • "House Sparrow" vs. "house sparrow": Lower case. [144] [145] [146]
  • "Blue Tit" vs. "blue tit": Lower case. [147] [148] [149] [150] [151] [152] (But note that "blue tit" may well produce irrelevant results, e.g. for bodypainting, but this is somewhat reduced by excluding the American English corpus, since "tit" as a breast reference is a bit of an Americanism.) Lower case also goes for "Blue Titmouse" vs. "blue titmouse". [153] [154]
  • "Coal Tit" vs. "coal tit": Mixed usage, but more toward lower case. [155] [156] [157]
  • "Collared Dove" vs. "collared dove": Lower case. [158] [159] [160]
  • "Long-tailed Tit" vs. "long-tailed tit": Lower case. [161] [162] [163] (There's a very slight recent capitalization edge for the uncommon variant "Long-tailed Titmouse" vs. "long-tailed titmouse". [164])
  • "Carrion Crow" vs. "carrion crow": Lower case. [165] [166] [167]
  • "Great Spotted Woodpecker" vs. "great spotted woodpecker": Mixed usage. [168] [169] [170]
  • "Snow Bunting" vs. "snow bunting": Lower case. [171] [172] [173] (Some evidence of a slight late-2000s increase in capitalization.)
  • "Jack Snipe" vs. "jack snipe": Mixed usage. [174] [175] [176] (Note: This may produce false pro-capitalization results because there are people named Jack Snipe. Note also that incorrect capitalization of "jack" by itself, mistaking it for a proper name, accounts for some usage. [177] And the comnpounded versions are usually lower-cased. [178] [179] [180]
  • "Brent Goose" vs. "brent goose": Mixed usage. [181] [182] [183] (Factoring in mistaken partial capitalization as "Brent goose/geese" because of an assumption that Brent is a proper name, the lower casing actually wins out.)
  • "Song Thrush" vs. "song thrush": Lower case. [184] [185] [186] (Some evidence of increase in capitalization, but some of increase and then decrease.)
  • "Black-headed Gull" vs. "black-headed gull": Lower case. [187] [188] [189]
  • "Lesser Redpoll" vs. "lesser redpoll": Mixed usage. [190] [191] [192] (not commonly mentioned, and capitalization is usually with "the", so most often these are field guide hits.)
  • "Marsh Tit" vs. "marsh tit": Mixed usage, but more toward lower case. [193] [194] [195]

Reptiles and amphibians:

Except in specialty publications like species checklists and field guides, capitalization is virtually unheard-of. Using lists of popular, high-profile species, and searching back to the 1960s to try to get more hits (hits are much less common than for birds, and most species on such lists produce no ngrams):

Herptile ngrams
  • green sea turtle [196] (An especially damning case for capitalization, since this is a classic example of a name that is supposedly to ambiguous – too easily mistaken for "a sea turtle of some kind that happens to be green" – to not be capitalized, except almost no one capitalizes it, even when the stats are skewed by field guides and other pro-capitalization specialist books!)
  • Galapagos land iguana [197] [198] (no capitalized hits at all)
  • Tokay gecko [199] (no capitalized hits at all)
  • poison dart frog [200] (no capitalized hits at all)
  • eastern coral snake [201] (no capitalized hits at all)
  • eastern diamondback rattlesnake [202] (finally a few upper-case hits, but a tiny minority)
  • western diamondback rattlesnake [203] (ditto)
  • Pacific giant salamander [204] (ditto)
  • crested newt [205]
  • cane toad [206] (ditto)
  • Nile monitor [207] (ditto)
  • Indian cobra [208] (ditto)
  • saltwater crocodile [209] (ditto)
  • mugger crocodile [210] (no capitalized hits)
  • Gila monster [211] (a few more capitalized hits, but still over 2:1 against, and some of the capitalized ones are probably song titles, etc.)
  • Komodo dragon [212] (as with Gila monster; perhaps these two unusual names seem to inspire a bit more capitalization, because they sound like fairytale creatures)

Species lists

  • Bailey, R. M. (chairman); Lachner, E. A.; Lindsey, C. C.; Robins, C. R.; Roedel, P. M.; Scott, W. B.; Woods, L. P. (1960). A List of Common and Scientific Acceptance of the Committee’s Recommended Names of Fishes from the United States and Canada. Special Publication 2. (2nd ed.). Bethesda, Maryland, US: American Fisheries Society. Principle 5. Common names shall not be capitalized in text use except for those elements that are proper names (e.g. rainbow trout, but Sacramento perch).{{ cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list ( link)
    • Nelson, Joseph S.; Starnes, Wayne C.; Warren, Melvin L. (July 2002). "A Capital Case for Common Names of Species of Fishes–A white crappie or a White Crappie". Fisheries. 27 (7). American Fisheries Society. "Fisheries Forum Opinion" section, pp. 31–33. ISSN  0363-2415. Retrieved 2012-01-08.{{ cite journal}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list ( link). A highly defensive piece in favor of title-casing fish common names. It at least makes it plain that the proposal has nothing to do with common names being proper nouns, and it "is to us all a matter of convention". They believe that capitalization "best serves the interests of" their concept of "the fishery user" of common names, i.e. "fish biologists communicating" in "areas such as fisheries, science, management, administration, and education"; not the general public, though they feel that someday style guides might actually agree with them on their convention. [If that were actually plausible it would already have happened for bird names, and it has not, in academic publishing or general-audience publishing.]
      • Kendall, Robert L. (July 2002). "A Capital Punishment". Fisheries. 27 (7). op. cit. "Fisheries Forum Opinion" section, pp. 33–34. Retrieved 2012-01-08. {{ cite journal}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= ( help) (Truncated copy at this URL.) Kendall criticizes Nelson et al. for inappropriate "veneration" of species, undermining industry and academic credibility, pushing an agenda not within their scope, ignoring for no clear gain the grammar rules that matter to many people, trying to undo a very widespread consensus that was difficult and slow to forge, harming the ability of the list-publishing organizations to get international consensus on the vernacular fish names they are advancing, and ignoring the clear fact that capitalization of various things as if they were proper nouns is a practice that has been declining for "a long time". [He's right on that for sure - this Germanic capitalization of nouns has been disappearing from English since around the time of the American Revolution and was already extremely uncommon by the turn of the 20th century.]

Organizations

  • General biology organizations almost never capitalize common names.
    • National Geographic Society – lower case, "even" for bids (which are explicitly addressed here. NGS defers to "A Guide to Forming and Capitalizing Compound Names of Birds in English" (Auk, 95: 324–326), except rejecting the capitalization as "not appropriate in most NGS publications", which have a general, wide audience.
  • Capitalization is common at ornithology organizations, and WP:BIRDS asserts that they mostly do so under IOC's rules (however, IOC's own website only lists one partially compliant organization).
  • Here are some counter-examples
  • Organizations that are not writing exclusively for a narrow audience who do capitalize, but which are themselves also specialist publishers, do not capitalize:
    • Nature, Science, and virtually all other general science and biology peer-reviewed journals (WP:BIRDS dug up a single exception that permitted field-specific capitalization).
    • ADF&G Writer's Guide (PDF) (Second ed.). Alaska Department of Fish and Game. 1999. Archived from the original (PDF) on 24 July 2004. – Lower-cases all vernacular names, including birds, explicitly against in-house conventions of ornithology publishers: "[W]e do not follow [American Ornithologists' Union's] practice of capitalizing all common names of birds; instead, we follow the widespread nomenclatural custom using capitals for only that part of a common name that is an established proper name (e.g., Pacific loon, common loon)." They also explicitly do this with fish, despite the American Fisheries Society's preference for capitalization.

Journals

  • Capitalization is common in ornithology journals, and WP:BIRDS asserts that they mostly do so under IOC's rules (however, IOC's own website [213] only lists one compliant journal (as of June 2015), the Wilson Journal of Ornithology (which only uses the IOC list for birds outside of North and Central America).
  • But not all ornithology journals, not even all the major ones, require or even permit capitalization (contradicting frequent claims of unanimity by the pro-caps camp):
  • Non-ornithology journals virtually never permit capitalization: Science [214] Proceedings of the Royal Society, Part B: Biology (Proc. Biol. Sci.) [215] [216]; Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA [217] [218]; Respiration Physiology [219]; Animal Behavior [220]; Acta Crystallographica, Section D: Biological Crystallography [221], Molecular Biology and Evolution [222]; Comparative Biochemistry and Physiology, Part C: Toxicology & Pharmacology [223]; Journal of Thermal Biology [224]; and many, many others. Contrast this with WP:BIRDS participant insisting here that "Any source that does not capitalize bird names is immediately viewed as amateur." Um, WP:BOLLOCKS.

Style and grammar guides

  • Grammar guides standardize on lower case for species names, and (when they mention them) upper case for breeds and cultivars. Some even specifically eschew capitalization of bird names, e.g. DailyWritingTips.com: "[A]s in the case of plant names, animal names are not capitalized ('I spotted a red-tailed hawk,' not 'I spotted a Red-Tailed Hawk'), except when an element of the name is a proper noun, as in 'Steller's jay' and 'Siberian tiger.'" [225]
  • The Chicago Manual of Style (16th [online] ed.). U. of Chicago Pr. 2010.; full access requires paid account or hardcopy – explicitly lower-cases bird species common names and all others:
    • "Sec. 8: Names and Terms, Subsec. 8.127 Vernacular Names of Plants and Animals—additional resources" says "In general, Chicago recommends capitalizing only proper nouns and adjectives, as in the following examples, which conform to Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary: Dutchman's-breeches, jack-in-the-pulpit, mayapple, Cooper's hawk, rhesus monkey, Rocky Mountain sheep". Note "Cooper's hawk".
    • It says in the same section: "For the correct capitalization and spelling of common names of plants and animals, consult a dictionary or the authoritative guides to nomenclature, the ICBN and the ICZN", meaning the International Code of Botanical Nomenclature, recently renamed the International Code of Nomenclature for algae, fungi, and plants, and International Code of Zoological Nomenclature. Note they don't open-endedly say "authoritative guides", but specify the two guides they consider authoritative.
    • Here are some big interpretation hints: Dictionaries do not capitalize common names of species, including birds. The ICZN (which is an actual nomenclature authority, unlike the IOC) does not capitalize common names of species, including birds. The ICN/ICBN does not capitalize the common names of species, at all, despite some botanical groups liking to capitalize; see first source entry above.
    • At neither section does CMoS drill down to the narrow level of the IOC, much less suggest following different conventions for different orders of animals, nor academic/scientific conventions at all if they conflict with general usage.
    • At "8.118 Scientific style—additional resources", CMoS defers to [only] the ICZN and ICBN, here, too. At "8.119 Genus and specific epithet", it gives several examples of common names of species, and all are lower-case.
    • See also "7.48 Capitals for emphasis", which says: "Initial capitals, once used to lend importance to certain words, are now used only ironically (but see 8.93 [Platonic ideals])."
    • Common names of species also do not qualify as proper names/nouns under the terms at "5.6 Proper nouns", which can only be "the specific name of a person, place, or thing" [a species is not a thing, but a categorical classification of things; one might as well capitalize "Chevrolet Four-door Automobile"].
    • CMoS does not give a single example of a common name of any species being capitalized, except where it contains a proper name.
    • The 15th ed. is identical on all of these points, other than the section numbering, including "Cooper's hawk" as exemplary.
    • CMoS is generally considered the leading American style guide for non-journalistic writing.
    • Note that this is even after CMoS has had plenty of time (the 15th ed. dates to 2003) to pick up on this debate at WP and offline and change their mind, but they still side firmly with lower case.
  • The following style guides do not address the question at all, or only obliquely:
    • "The Guardian and Observer Style Guide" (2014 [226]), other than to suggest animal breeds (species are never mentioned) should be lower case. However, a very large percentage of this style guide's advice is appropriate only to informal British news journalism, and much of it conflicts directly with MOS.
    • "Style-book of the Manchester Guardian" (1928)
    • "BBC News Styleguide" (2003), but it is mostly about broadcasting, in which written style is of minimal to zero relevance
    • "English Style Guide: A handbook for authors and translators in the European Commission" (7th Ed., 2011); yet at sect. 8.1, it notes that non-technical usage of names that coincide with scientific ones are not capitalized or italicized: the genus Rhododendron but many rhododendron growers; this at least leans against any notion of capitalizing bird species names, since in many cases this exact coincidence will occur. Many other style guides also raise this same point, including CMoS.
    • "EU Interinstitutional Style Guide" (2011 [227]); it's "10.4. Capitals and lower case" section has nothing of relevance at all.

Encyclopedias

Grzimek's Animal Life Encyclopedia ( ISBN  0787653624) uses title-case capitalization for article titles and lower case in running prose

Dictionaries

  • Oxford English Dictionary – no capitalization ("blackbird, n. A common Eurasian thrush, Turdus merula")
  • Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary – no capitalization ("Cooper's hawk", etc.)
  • Merriam-Webster.com – no capitalization ("ovenbird: noun ... an American warbler (Seirurus aurocapillus) that builds a dome-shaped nest on the ground" [228])

Field guides

  • Almost all field guides on all topics use capitalization, boldfacing, italics, small-caps, underlining, font color, or Some Combination of These, to make entries stand out, often including in running text. This is simply emphasis as a visual scanning aid and does not represent any sort of formal standard. It's simply field guide style, and WP does not have to adopt it any more than we'd adopt journalism style or comic book style or textbook style or corporate memo style.
  • Yet not all bird field guides do capitalize, or do so consistently/sanely:
    • Firefly Encyclopedia of Birds ( ISBN  1552977773) – doesn't use "official" capitalization, but capitalizes the first letter of each species name, even in running text (i.e., "Europe has a lot of Barn swallows"). Virtually no one on Wikipedia would find this acceptable, and virtually no other sources do it.

Editorials

  • Anselm Atkins, in The Auk 100(4): 1003–1004 (October–December 1983) [ SORA link] [ JSTOR link]:

    "...what is the authority against [capitalization]? Any American dictionary. Look up 'blue jay.'"
    Atkins continues:

    "Most field guides and some other books do use capitals. On the other hand, birds are confined to lower case in the writings of Darwin, Thoreau, Muir, Aldo Leopold, Stephen Gould, and many others. Highly literate magazines such as Audubon, Smithsonian, National Geographic and National Wildlife do not capitalize birds' names. Neither do Science or Scientific American. A great number of writers and editors thus follow the dictionary rather than the CBE [Council of Biology Editors, which follows the IOC rule for bird names, or at least did at the time Atkins was writing]. ...

    "Language changes; grammatical usages come and go. There are no eternal verities here; convention and consent are all. Rules of grammar are not handed down from on high--they are merely a codification of actual usage. The dictionary says 'what is,' not 'what should be.' Nevertheless, it is proper to follow 'what is' as determined by the compilers of current dictionaries. Professional ornithologists and lepidopterists, whose writings surely constitute only a fraction of today's literature, cannot possibly win the day (but what a gallant showing of nets and binoculars against all those typewriters, word processors, and printing presses!). Lacking an Archimedes' fulcrum, we shall never change convention but only succeed in violating it. Meanwhile, our idiosyncrasy causes confusion among those who want to write birds' names correctly. It would be most helpful if we would generously concede and conform. As Humpty-Dumpty said (it's impossible to make it through a reflective essay without quoting Lewis Carroll), it is a question of who is to be master. In this instance, let us surrender to the dictionary. Until we do, we ornithologists, with our Important Capitals, continue to look Curiously Provincial."

    • Eloise F. Potter wrote a response to this, in The Auk 101(4):895–6 (October 1984) [ SORA link] [ JSTOR link]. It is probably the nastiest, least reasonable attack piece ever published in a peer-reviewed journal since the 19th century. The Auk's editors should be ashamed for running it. Here's an example of its combined ad hominem and straw man approach: "Anselm Atkins ... reminds me of my children when they were young and pleaded for special privileges by saying, 'But Mother, everybody's doing it!'" Some further character-assassinating argument to emotion, and a barely disguised version of the " no true Scotsman" fallacy: "In my opinion, biologists who oppose the recognition of vernacular names of plant and animal species as proper nouns [i.e., capitalized] are not interested in communicating effectively with the widest possible readership ...." Instead of addressing the point that no one outside of some ornithology journals capitalizes bird common names (and even they do it for ornithologist convenience, not because of any specious proper name argument), Potter just insists that vernacular names of all species (not just birds) are proper names, without any linguistic or philosophic understanding. Her only source for this idea is a 1945 edition of a grammar book intended for the elementary and middle school markets, and which actually contradicts her ("the name of a particular person, place, or thing" is the exact opposite of a name for a general class of things). She then berates anyone who disagrees for "slavish adherence to any particular style manual", apparently unaware of both the concept of psychological projection and the fact that Atkins and others point to all usage everywhere except the style promulgated by IOC.

      It's interesting that she writes: "During my 20 years as editor of The Chat, I have heard Atkins's arguments against the propriety of capitalizing English species names at least a hundred times." This is really remarkable. Even capitalizing bird names in the local newsletter of the Chattanooga Chapter of the Tennessee Ornithological Society, a hundred people have told her she's wrong, despite several journals in the field also preferring this practice. If this isn't proof that this capitalization scheme doesn't actually have much support even within ornithology, then what is? She closes with an observation that "the major ornithological journals" were also not capitalizing, but that she decided to do so in her newsletter because some grad student submitted a paper with "virginia pine" (lower-case "v"). This isn't even rational. The reason to capitalize "Virginia" has nothing to do with whether one should capitalize the entire thing as "Virginia Pine", as Potter advocates. The weird thing is Potter is well aware that the real rationale for the capitalization is just emphasis, making the text easier to skim by birders in a hurry: "Even specialists reading in their own field find capitalized or italicized words easy to pick out when they are scanning many pages of material in search of statements pertaining to a particular species." This is the same reason that field guides, manuals, and other insider material in all specializations of all kinds capitalize terms of art that general-audience publications do not. It's the diametric opposite of capitalization of something because it's a proper name, which is done in all publications.

      Potter also raised the same pseudo-issue that the pro-capitalization camp does on Wikipedia: "Without capitals or Latin names, how does one distinguish between three common black-headed gulls (three individuals of Larus ridibundus) and three common black-headed gulls (L. ridibundus, pipixcan, and atricilla)?" It's a self-answering question: You write more clearly and include the Latin names where needed, obviously. You don't even need the Latin names if you're trying to avoid them; just write better than a child would: "The species named the common black-headed gull is not to be confused with two other common species of gulls with black heads, Franklin's gull and the laughing gull." This is not rocket science (and note that Wikipedia does not capitalize that as Rocket Science, either).

  • Lund, Nick (July 9, 2013). "A Word on the Capitalization of Bird Names". The Birdist. self-published blog. – An impassioned pro-capitalization piece by a birdwatcher, who does not appear to understand that a trademark is not like a bird common name, and dismisses grammatical/linguistic arguments out of hand, without actually addressing them, simply on the basis that to lower-case a bird name "is to rob it of its magic" whatever that means, and is "disrespectful" to birders (as if the capitalization isn't equally disrespectful to everyone else). Like Potter, above, he also clearly indicates a confusion between proper names and emphasis: "Sometimes even capital letters at the start of the words aren't enough, and we distinguish species in bold or in all-caps." Wikipedia does not, nor do other mainstream sources, other than field guides. He does correctly, if awkwardly, note something about vernacular naming and how it is not really a scientific taxonomic dispute at all, but something for hobbyists to bicker about: "To a scientist, though, treating species not as icons but as data (or, more likely, with a much better understanding of the muddy fluidity that is the 'species' concept), or to a layperson, who couldn't give a crap either way, the common name is meaningless, unworthy of extra typeface." However, we know from 9 years of dispute here that lay readers do in fact care; they find the capitalization annoying or worse and (this being a wiki) frequently attempted to undo it, until Wikipedia finally abandoned it. The blogger's own respondents mostly disagree with him. D'oh. And these are birders, remember.
  • Penelope, Hillemann (December 12, 2010). "Bird Names: To Capitalize or Not". Penelopedia: Nature and Garden in Southern Minnesota. self-published. – The page leads with: "Update (Jan. 2014): This post ... is one of the most frequently visited posts I've written. The issue clearly comes up for people a lot." She encourages people to go through the readers' comments, and well we should. One will see the sharp divide between the rationality of writing for your readers, vs. the argument to emotion of obeying IOC's specialized-audience expectations no matter what the audience really is, insisting that not abusing capitalization this way is being "lazy" about the English language (a case of the Dunning–Kruger effect, with non-linguists assuming their linguistic ideas are correct and that those who disagree are at fault), and/or not recognizing the difference between the faulty proper name argument, the appeal to authority in trying to push the IOC specialized journal practice everywhere, and capitalization for scannability/emphasis.

    The core point of the piece is this: "There's a split here, basically between ornithologists and the rest of the writing world, except where style guides expressly defer to the common usage in a particular field." (Hint: Wikipedia expressly does not.) This practice in the world of ornithology departs from that in most other areas of plant and animal classification, which follows the generally accepted rule of reserving capitalization for proper nouns (such as names of specific people and places, and trade names). She continues: "Some defenders of the IOC approach say that birds' names ARE proper names, equating Bald Eagle with Johnny Depp, but that doesn't explain why most other groups of animal and plant biologists don't apparently feel the same." She also, as did IOC's own website, mentioned that Wikipedia at that time seemed to be making "an exception" for birds. That wasn't actually correct (MOS observed that there was a then-unresolved dispute about birds and that people shouldn't editwar over it), and is now moot. Hillemann's piece is divided on what to do: "As a writer and editor (this is a significant part of what I do for a living) who is not a trained ornithologist, I have to say those capitals catch my eye. When I use them in my blog posts, they start to bug me. They look old-fashioned and, as Atkins notes, overly Important. They don't seem necessary for clarity most of the time when I or others are writing carefully, though they do indeed convey instant information that sometimes helps avoid ambiguity." (I.e., capitalization for emphasis.)

    Her ultimate conclusion: "I'm not sure I have a final decision. And, after all this wallowing, I'm not sure that it's really all that important to decide. But if I were writing a ... style guide right now, here's where I think I'd start, recognizing that I'm a generalist who writes for a wide audience, not an expert writing for a scholarly audience:

    • Use IOC format (caps) in lists of bird species, but --
    • Use dictionary format (no caps) in general text. There, I said it. I feel relieved. But I will --
    • Add the Latin species name in parentheses when needed for clarity"

    In the comments section, she wisely distinguishes between false analogies, such as Potter's likening of a species common name to Lincoln Continental, a trademark. She also observes: "people who are knowledgeable about birds simply are not likely to use terms like "yellow warbler" and "gray jay" to describe a generic bird of that description"; i.e., they know to write clearly to avoid ambiguity. She quotes someone else in a Bird Forum discussion making the same point: "'[I]n truth you would never write it in that way, you would adjust your language to make clear what you were saying.'" Hillemann concludes: "I believe that when writing for a general audience, using language carefully is at least as powerful a tool for clear communication as using capitals for bird names."

  • http://www.birdforum.net/showthread.php?t=204022 – Bird Forum discussion. [Not examined yet.]
  • Dawson, W. Leon (May–June 1907). "In Regard to the Mooted Points". The Condor. 9 (3): 95–96. [ JSTOR link] – This debate goes at least as far back as 1907. In addition to objecting to use of the metric system, Dawson makes an impassioned "hearty Yes!" argument for capitalization, on two grounds 1) "prominence and eye ease" (i.e., capitalization for emphasis), and 2) the argument that the common names are more stable than the Latin scientific names. In hindsight, this proves not to be true. Modern genetics and cladistics has nailed down most genera pretty well, while it turns out that for a large number of species, there are multiple vernacular names, and IOC itself has even tried to impose new ones that are not used by anyone, in vain attempts to split the difference. Dawson writes that "the English[-language] name in fact deserves as much consideration at the hands of an editor who would be understood as the scientific name." That's arguably true, but it does not logically follow that capitalization is the only or best way to do that. Dawson then makes the argument with which we're all already familiar: "the name of a species, whether English or Latin, is a proper name." As with others who stood on his shaky shoulders, he appears to not actually understand the principles behind proper names from either the linguistics perspective or philosophy one. His idea is simply that because we don't call individual specimens of Audubon's warbler (Setophaga coronata auduboni, which he calls the "Audubon Warbler", demonstrating how the vernacular name has changed despite his insistence that they don't change) by names like "Mary", that this must mean "Audubon Warbler" is a proper name. That's not a cogent argument at all. One does not name the individual rocks in the gravel in one's driveway "Steve", "Janet", etc., but this does not make "My Driveway Gravel" a proper name, despite this gravel being clearly distinguished from the gravel in your neighbor's driveway, or the gravel at the bottom of a river 20 miles away. But more to the point, many people do individually name plenty of birds with "personal" names, as pets or familiar frequent wild visitors. It has nothing to do with whether a species epithet, our term for an aggregate group, is a proper name. Such labels are not proper names, except, by universal (not specialist) convention when applied to a few narrowly defined classes of things, almost all of them human (e.g., ethnicities, and political parties). Anyway, Dawson concludes with the other tired assertion that we can't be understood if we don't capitalize, because "evening grosbeak" might refer to the Evening Grosbeak (as he writes it), or any grosbeak seen in the evening. But even a child understands that all we have to do is write carefully to avoid such an ambiguity.

    Dawson goes further than most, demanding "let us use capitals always in presenting specific names of birds, and elsewhere in referring to the higher groups, wherever uncertainty is likely to exist in the mind of the dullest reader." At least we know how he feels about non-ornithologists. He actually suggests that "Warbler" be capitalized to distinguish a reference to the Mniotiltidae family (which he spells Mniotiltidæ, though that could be an editorial change). Even IOC doesn't recommend this. The take-away conclusion is that the arguments for capitalization have not improved in any way in over 100 years, and that proponents of it simply don't acknowledge refutation of their position, no matter how many generations of people refute it. They just re-assert their position as if it were new and unassailable. This is known as the fallacy of proof by assertion. That the arguments have not even slightly been adjusted in all this time is highly curious. They originate from a time when Victorian prescriptive grammar was strongly in favor of a large amount of capitalization that current, modern English does not accept. Dawson's own letter refers to the publisher as "the Society", the publication's editor as "Mr. Editor", and the publisher's president as "the President" (in mid-sentence, not in a salutation, and without being attached to any names), a practice no modern style guide endorses. So why would a capitalization idea that dates to an age of over-capitalization (which back then would probably be capitalized as Age of Over-Capitalization) have such stubborn staying power? See WP:Specialized-style fallacy for why. Insiders in all fields just really like to capitalize stuff that's important to them, and occasionally they insistently push this style outside their field. We're all really tired of it.

  • Polunin, Nicolas (March 1953). "Capitalization or Decapitalization Encore une Fois!". Taxon. 2 (2): 25–26. [ JSTOR link&#93 – Polunin describes how fighting over capitalization directly disrupted the Seventh International Botanical Congress (Stockholm, 1950). This nonsense hasn't only been disruptive on Wikipedia for ten years, but generally, everywhere, for generations. He expressed doubt that instituting a simple rule like " Specific and subspecific epithets should be written with a small initial letter" (even when derived from proper names, even in journals that have a "tradition" of capitalizing them) would actually work. But it did; these are no longer capitalized by anyone, anywhere. This is an important lesson: Make a rule, with across-the-board applicability, insist on it, and don't change it. Whether every single person agrees it's the best rule, and some may badly desire an exception, is far less important that putting an end to pointless strife about trivia, by instituting a rule and moving on. Those who can't stand the rule will eventually just die, humans being mortal after all.

Advocacy of IOC or some other PoV-pushing "standard"

  • Talk:Hooded Dotterel#Requested move (January 2014)
  • WP:BIRDCON and discussions leading up to it; those in favor of lower case disproved, through off-site research, that claims of IOC being a widely accepted standard were false; even IOC's own website very clearly indicates what little real-world buy-in it has, and that even where aspects of it are accepted, others are not, inconsistently. Use of IOC style conventions on WP was a patent case of WP:ADVOCACY by fans of the spread of IOC conventions in the real world.
  • Template:IOC name exception: "IOC World Bird Names ... is the de facto naming standard within the Wikiproject:Birds." This was really problematic. Template deleted at TfD: Wikipedia:Templates for discussion/Log/2018 November 14#Template:IOC name exception in 2018. It was a lingering bit of WP:BATTLEGROUNDing that needed to be nuked back in 2014, but which didn't get noticed and was still appearing in about 30 articles. It was created by the same person who was regularly updating the IOC website with news of their "progress" in forcing IOC names into Wikipedia as an "official standard" here.

Possible alternative solution to lower-casing

Stale
 – This idea has not been popular so far (see talk page); small-caps is a rather disfavored style, but we're low on alternatives other than underlining.

Short version: Stop capitalizing vernacular names (except for a proper name inside a vernacular), but instead use the {{ Smallcaps}} template: California slender salamander.

Extended content

Why we should bother to consider this any further:

There's a long-standing consensus on Wikipedia as a whole, since 2008 and reaffirmed by extensive discussions in 2012, and reaffirmed again every time the issue comes up in a venue that isn't controlled by a pro-capitalization wikiproject, to use lower case for the common (vernacular) names of species. As of 2014-04-21, a straw poll at WT:MOS shows a 3-to-1 majority in favor of lower-case, and this is consistent with past discussions. Isn't the matter already over?

I've been doing a lot of thinking about this, and have come to the conclusion that there are principally two factors at work here that make resolution of the matter difficult and, regardless of polls and RfCs, are likely to lead to continued unhappiness and strife no matter which way such a binary choice goes:

  1. Many writers, both on and off Wikipedia, in and out of academia, recognize capitalization in particular as not just some kind of emphasis like boldfacing, italicizing, use of small-caps, underlining, etc. MOS (see MOS:CAPS) is quite explicit about this and has been for years. While not everyone agrees, and some (particularly in specialty publications where writing conventions are often bent on purpose to expedite communication among professionals/devotees, in a form of code) do want to treat capitals as simply a style choice, for many it is palpably different. This isn't a matter of whim or subjective opinion, as this view is supported by most reliable sources on English-language writing. Capitalization has much stricter rules surrounding it (in English, anyway), in virtually all style guides and other sources of guidance on how to write in this language. This is why people care more, react more negatively, to neologistic usage like capitalizing all names of a certain class of things as if they're proper names, more so than they react to, say, italicizing them. The language is steadily moving away from capitalization, so it is unlikely that the "why the hell is that capitalized?!" reaction is going to get anything but stronger. [Note that I'm not making any kind of prescriptive or value-based judgment here; this is all just descriptive observation of facts.]
  2. While many of the specialty publications of virtually all fields engage in emphasis of some sort as a simple stylistic convention, capitalization in a handful of fields has become so ingrained that it may be perceived as "insulting" to its practitioners/constituents or "ignorant" to do it any other way (even while everyone else feels the same way about the imposition on them of this capitalization). The principal, often only, reason is that the emphasis is useful for disambiguation. [In the birds case, a claim has been also made by some WP:BIRDS editors that there's a formal, universally accepted international standard, but this is an exaggeration.] They already know the arguments against this clarity idea in this medium in particular, which can disambiguate with linking and using clearer writing, yet some of them insist on it anyway. Resistance to lower-casing is not universal among specialists whose fields often capitalize common names in their own specialist publications; e.g., herpetologists have not put up a fight about it, and almost all of the reptile and amphibian articles have been decapitalized without any fuss, from specialists or from readers. But it happens often enough to be a problem. The arguments (whether one considers them strong or not) to do away with the capitalization here consequently makes those who prefer it for reasons they see as important feel like they're being singled out and picked on.

This conflict continues because the pro-LC side see capitalization for emphasis as unacceptably abusive of a distinct, especially meaningful feature of the language as if it were the same as some others (which are all typeface styling), and that it's being done for no reason but inappropriate emphasis, while the pro-UC side are firmly convinced that they're being denied, for no reason, the same kind or level (if not precise form) of markup that is used to denote titles of published works, or foreign words interpolated into English, or whathaveyou, and that not getting to capitalize causes serious ambiguity problems in their material.

What if there were another way, that didn't play favorites? Using small-caps style is the most obvious such way, and would not conflict with other usage or rules.

One thing I've picked up in the course of researching both the MOS:ORGANISMS draft and this entire "birdcaps" dispute is that many sources (journals, field guides, websites, encyclopedic works, prosey naturalist writing, etc.) in many biological fields as well as more general works, do believe firmly in the power of typographically disambiguating, e.g., the California slender salamander from slender salamanders in California. But they often do it without resorting to use/abuse of capitalization. The most common alternative is small-capitals typography, of the specific form distinguishes actual capitalization: California slender salamander. WP doesn't presently use that kind of typography for much of anything programmatic, and I can see a strong argument being made for using it in biological articles for the formal English-language vernacular names of species of anything, when they're being discussed as species. I.e., it would be used for both " cougar" and "mountain lion" but not regionalisms or slang like "painter" with regard to that species, nor for foreign names not assimilated into English like "okapi" has been. Nor would it be used when distinguishing species is not important, e.g. in "injured while riding a horse".

It still would not entirely please every one of the birders, some of whom are [unreasonably, in my view] convinced that bird names are proper names and must be capitalized no matter what, that the capital letters in particular are somehow more important than the disambiguation-by-emphasis function they serve. But it seems like a reasonable compromise, and WP:Consensus does not require total unanimity. All indications may be that, WP-wide, there's at least a 2/3 majority in favor of lower-casing all vernacular names, so, the argument goes, we might as well just do it. But why go that "we win, so stop capitalizing" route, which smacks of us-vs.-them thinking and WP:WINNING, if it's guaranteed to piss off some subset of productive editors, if there's a way to keep almost everyone happy? That's my thinking. [I'm much more peace-minded that I get credit for.] Those to whom the disambiguation function is more important than the upper-case form should like this idea. No more "it is/is not a proper name" fight, either. [That's a fight that capitalizers will lose, because the reliable sources in linguistics and philosophy of language are strongly against them on this.]

The best way to approach implementing this might be a bit technological, with a {{vernacular name}} template (with a shortcut like {{vername}}) that takes care of this stuff as a CSS style matter. This way people with accounts can use their own CSS pages here to disable or change this styling if they want. I'm thinking that user-level Javascript might even be able to force-capitalize for those who want them capitalized, without imposing it on others.

 —  SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  01:01, 22 April 2014 (UTC) (subject to revision)

PS: Yes, do feel free to use the talk page here if this is worth discussing in this form.  —  SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  11:03, 22 April 2014 (UTC)

A variant of this idea is to similarly use such a template, with a CSS class, to apply some other stylistic change, e.g. a serif font, that raises fewer objections than smallcaps does. Those who actually like the smallcaps idea can simply use CSS to change it to that style. THose who don't want any such style can do likewise to remove it. It's also noteworthy that such a solution can also be implemented for the official names of standardized breeds, should we want to decapitalize them (which is maybe a 50/50 chance).  —  SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  22:30, 31 May 2015 (UTC)

Unexamined discussions (may need link-fixing because of archival)

Other organism-related titling issues

Scientific versus vernacular names

There are a whole bunch of threads about this, especially regarding plants and extinct animals, but also broader ones.

Just starting with 1 link for now, but there are probably 50+ to find:

Naming-unrelated

Behavior/temperament sections at breed articles, and the original research and bad sourcing they're full of:

See also

Relevant policies and guidelines

Quoted in May 2014 – may need updating.

Relevant essays

  • Wikipedia:Specialized-style fallacy ( WP:SSF): An in-depth (albeit intemperate) exploration of all the reasoning flaws involved in pushing onto Wikipedia various style quirks from specialist publications
  • Wikipedia:Don't feed the nabobs ( WP:NABOBS): "[C]onsider whether or not doing something would make Wikipedia look silly to those who don't 'get' Wikipedia like we do. And if it would, in that case, the likely answer is: don't." The biggest complaint about capitalizing species common names is that it makes Wikipedia look like it's written by marginally-literate twits who capitalize misc. noun phrases as a clumsy form of emphasis.
  • Wikipedia:Competence is required ( WP:COMPETENCE) "Assuming that people are trying to help seems trivial—but if someone is ... sometimes helpful but at others majorly disruptive, this may generate a net loss to a project that must not be allowed to continue." "The best good will is for nought if a basic understanding of the facts, their mainstream interpretation, and their cultural context are lacking."
  • Wikipedia:Expert retention#A cumulatively dysfunctional system: " Tribes of influential (= have the most free time on their hands) admins and editors have decided that WP policies say something other than what they actually say. They want to have loose reins to make WP their playground for their own particular agendas. People who follow strict and standardized interpretations of policies threaten that and must be stalked and rebuffed. ... The problem on WP is not so much the obvious trolls but the ones who ... see the truth of contrary arguments yet refuse from selfishness to acknowledge them; who endlessly Wikilawyer the most obvious points, and enforce not the policies but the policies as they privately interpret them through the grid of their own private agendas." The rest of the essay is, unfortunately, almost totally in favor of wikiprojects having increased fiefdom-like editorial control. However, it's also been moribund for several years.
  • Wikipedia:WikiProject Birds#Bird names and article titles ( WP:BIRDS#Naming): Principal source of all this strife. Advanced as a "guideline" by its proponents, it's just a wikiproject advice page essay. It said to use capitalization (and not only for IOC names, but all common names of bird species). It was updated to stop conflicting with MOS:LIFE, but who knows if it will stay that way.
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