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In the entry for the film For lung (as of 2013-01-24T12:47:10), a Hollywood Reporter quote reads (bolding by me), "Any real thought about the nature of duty and the law is swept aside for action, action, and more action-which is average for Lam [...]". Also, the corresponding article title is styled "Fire of Conscience -- Film Review". Are these two instances of hyphens-for-dashes usage to be corrected? Or must they be left alone, because they're integral to the source? – ὁ οἶστρος ( talk) 13:46, 24 January 2013 (UTC)
at Wikipedia_talk:Manual_of_Style/Pronunciation. The proposal (I think) is that we change the MOS to recommend moving pronunciations out of the lead. (Personally, and it would seem others agree, I think this is part of a larger problem with clutter per MOS:LEAD that I've tried addressing before.) — kwami ( talk) 01:09, 27 January 2013 (UTC)
How proper is it for an editor to make blanket changes to an article in keeping with WP:CONSISTENCY. For example, if an article uses half "color" and half "colour", but also "center" and perhaps an "armour", would we go back to the first non-stub from however many years prior and decide that everything is BrE or AmE and then change everything accordingly? Or would it be proper to change one word (for example making all "color"s to "colour" for sake of consistency) but retaining the rest (such as "center", so long as that was as its first used spelling). Thank you. - Kai445 ( talk) 17:22, 27 January 2013 (UTC)
Hello. We seem to need help with religious titles and honorifics. I please request that we discuss, achieve a consensus and write down guidelines. Please see the talk page of the article Gandhi for more details, regarding a proposed move to Mahatma Gandhi. Here is an excerpt from that conversation:
I have reverted an addition to the page, with this edit summary: "Revert addition of this text to the provisions for ellipses: '(This section does not apply to mathematical notion.)' [sic]; editors, please do not make substantive changes like that without discussing them first; and DO leave informative edit summaries♥". The editor then reverted my reversion, rather than discussing the change; so I reverted the edit again. In my edit summary I use the annotation "[sic]". Given the absence of the definite article ("to [the] mathematical notion"), it is not certain which of the following was intended:
1. (This section does not apply to the mathematical notion.)
2. (This section does not apply to mathematical notation.)
In my own opinion, neither version is warranted. 1 is unnecessary, since the context shows that the "elongated circles" of mathematics are plainly not the topic; and 2 is just not true. Let others have their say also.
Noetica Tea? 01:53, 3 February 2013 (UTC)
x + 1, x + 2, ..., x + n
Just in case there's any confusion, there is no rule requiring that anyone discuss changes before making them. It's often wise on pages like this one, but it is not required. Takuya does not need anyone's permission to edit the MoS, just like Noetica did not need anyone's permission to revert the change. Darkfrog24 ( talk) 04:45, 4 February 2013 (UTC)
Is there anything special that needs to be done for massive (100+ long) reference sections? The list at List of dog breeds is already 100 entries long, and if the working copy in my sandbox is anything to go by, will probably have closer to 500 or 600 citations before the listings for each breed is cited. Is there a way to make this list collapsible or otherwise smaller that complies with the MOS? -- TKK bark ! 13:41, 4 February 2013 (UTC)
Is there clear guidance on the best practice for designating infobox items which may be either singular or plural? Some infoboxs use the parenthetical (s); sometimes they have a space between the singular form and the (s), and some are displayed without space(s), some use a singular form even though they often have multiple entries, and still others use the plural form even if only one entry is included. WP:PLURALS is mute on the subject, and I think we should have a standard. Comments are needed, thank you.— My76 Strat • talk • email • purge 11:18, 31 January 2013 (UTC)
A large number of article titles use and capitalise the string "AT-LARGE" when it is not the first word of the title, e.g. Georgia's At-large congressional district special election, 1819, New York's At-large congressional seat. An apparently smaller number of articles do not capitalise the string, e.g. Georgia's at-large congressional district special election, 1813. In the text of these articles, I have only seen lowercase "at-large". Does the MOS or some more specific page have a preference for which capitalisation should be used in the titles, and in the texts of the articles? I have posted short notices pointing to this discussion on MOS:CAPS and WP:AT. -sche ( talk) 16:47, 6 February 2013 (UTC)
The question was raised at the above board and hasn't received any answer. I was also involved in the reverts, and have been looking for the policy that I common sense applied to do it, that is, "We should use what the source says". I will copy the question here and ask for any input you may have:
Gtwfan52 ( talk) 21:55, 7 February 2013 (UTC)
You are invited to join the discussion at Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/Dirtlawyer1. -- Trevj ( talk) 19:56, 10 February 2013 (UTC) (post-note reword, per WP:REFACTOR) -- Trevj ( talk) 19:56, 10 February 2013 (UTC)
AFAICT the problem SMcCandlish is highlighting [ above is a misunderstand of what the MOS covers. The MOS covers the usage within articles, its prescriptions do not necessarily cover article titles and it should have little to say about article titles because that is an issue for the AT policy and its naming conventions. Whether the capitalisation as proposed in the MOS is followed, or whether the capitalisation as proposed by some projects, comes down to the guidance in the naming conventions not in the MOS. As anyone who has followed the recent debate on the talk page of the AT policy must be aware by now WP:AT is based on weighing up the usage in reliable sources and several other criteria, one of which is the guidance given in the naming convention of capital letters, but that guidance may not be followed in all cases if the capitalisation of article titles about certain fauna, flora, ships or whatever is stylistically different form that in the MOS. -- PBS ( talk) 10:20, 7 February 2013 (UTC)
In titles we capitalize the first word of every title, and every other word as it appears in running text.– well, this is the point of contention at Wikipedia talk:Article titles#RfC on COMMONSTYLE proposal, where the debate seems about evenly divided to me, certainly with no clear consensus as yet. My interpretation of WP:AT (and PBS's if I understand it) is that you have stated it the wrong way round. In running text we capitalize as in the title, except for the first word which may be lowercased when not at the start of a sentence. First the title, determined by WP:AT, then the running text, determined by the title. It seems a logical order, given that it's the way one writes a new article. Peter coxhead ( talk) 18:42, 7 February 2013 (UTC)
There are those who instead argue that AT "trumps" MOS because it's a policy not a guideline, and thus that MOS should simply be ignored in such a case, regardless of the textual inconsistencies that will result within the article and between the article and other articles. This view badly misunderstands how
Wikipedia policy operates, and how policies and guidelines interact and differ (and don't differ). It's a
legalistic misinterpretation, a fetishizing of the word "policy". The short version is that the only thing important about AT being tagged with {{
policy}}
lately (this is actually quite recent) instead of {{
guideline}}
is that now one should be a bit more certain one is doing the right thing before invoking
WP:IAR to get around some problem it may be presenting to your ability to improve the encyclopedia. If this were not the case, all guidelines would have zero effect on policies. Yet we find that
WP:COMMONSENSE strongly affects almost all of them, frequently superseding virtually any concern they raise (other than external legal ones from
WP:OFFICE like
WP:BLP matters). COMMONSENSE is just one example. MOS is another. AT and its naming convention subpages (which are not policies) derive all of their style advice explicitly from MOS and its subpages, and always have. Literally hundreds of archived discussions on those pages have made this abundantly clear. —
SMcCandlish
Talk⇒ ɖ⊝כ⊙þ
Contrib.
06:40, 8 February 2013 (UTC)
WP:AT is about choosing the title, not the styling. As I have argued elsewhere, there isn't a simple contrast between "title" and "style". Some typographic style carries no meaning (a good example is a choice between "M. R. James" and "M.R. James"). Other typographic style does convey meaning (e.g. in running text the choice between "Brewer's sparrow" and "brewer's sparrow" or "Jack pine" and "jack pine"). WP:AT makes explicit the need to balance different factors (including use in reliable sources); currently the MOS does not, but should where style interacts with meaning. Peter coxhead ( talk) 15:50, 10 February 2013 (UTC)
I think it was a mistake to refactor my comment, because it has placed it out of context and my comment was not "tangential to that topic". I would appreciate it if the person who refactored my comment would place it back where it was before it was refactored. -- PBS ( talk) 20:55, 8 February 2013 (UTC)
To respond directly to the question in the heading, "Does MOS apply to article titles?", the first heading of the MOS has, for a very long time, been, "Article titles, headings, and sections", so it seems obvious that the consensus view has been that the MOS is, at least, intended to apply to article titles. So the question should really be: are there exceptions to the general rule that the MOS applies to titles, and if so, why?. -- Boson ( talk) 11:30, 12 February 2013 (UTC)
I couldn't find this addressed in the archives, though there is advice about Yahoo! and Guess? in /Trademarks/Archive 1 and about "logical punctuation" of quotes on several archived pages.
Is there a preferred treatment for titles of television series, films, books or other titles not enclosed in quotation marks where the title ends in a question mark or an exclamation mark? Consider this sentence from Norma Mendoza-Denton.
That looks plain awkward to me, with two marks of punctuation ending the sentence. An earlier version (which I wrote) styled it this way:
It was perhaps no better, since the sentence ends with a question mark although it is not a question. Another possibility would be to remove the question mark from the title (a la Yahoo), but that seems wrong since the title itself is a yes or no question.
I anticipate that someone will advise re-writing the sentence to put the title earlier in the sentence, but then what of commas?
Adding superfluous phrases is possible, but feels like a bit of a coward's way out.
Cnilep ( talk) 06:00, 8 February 2013 (UTC)
It seems at some point there has been local consensus at MOS:MUSIC#Capitalization to deviate from the MoS given at MOS:CT regarding composition titles that include parentheses. I would invite interested editors to contribute at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Capital letters#Contradiction and divergence at MOS:MUSIC. -- Rob Sinden ( talk) 11:35, 12 February 2013 (UTC)
Stephanie Fearon has an italicised title (it should not do) but I can't work out how this was achieved. I've checked for the {{ italic title}} template in the article but couldn't find anything obviously causing the italicised title in the page code. Am just asking here to see if anyone can shed any light on this and explain how to fix it. Mabalu ( talk) 11:58, 13 February 2013 (UTC)
I recently changed Forty Martyrs of England and Wales to have a consistent spelling of the word "canonize/canonise" throughout. [3] It seemed a little counter-intuitive to use -ize in an article on a British topic, but since the topic pre-dates standardization of either British or American spelling, I figured it would be okay, and from my understanding both spellings are actually acceptable in British English, just -ise is more common. Also, the very first version of the article had been written with the -ize spelling. I was soon reverted rather sloppily, though. [4] This revert ignored all the places in the article where -ize was still in use, and reintroduced inconsistency to the article. I then fixed this with another edit to remove all but one instance of -ize. [5] The remaining instance is, unfortunately, part of Template:Infobox martyrs, which uses the "American spelling" in every article in which it is used. Any idea how to get around this? elvenscout742 ( talk) 08:09, 19 February 2013 (UTC)
canon{{
ev|ox|ize}}
, that is translated on-the-fly for logged-in users (i.e. most active editors who even know about ENGVAR). American editors would see it in American English, and British editors who hate the Oxford z wouldn't see that spelling, and thus neither would be tempted to "fix" the article to use all American spellings or all non-Oxford British spellings. —
SMcCandlish
Talk⇒ ɖ⊝כ⊙þ
Contrib.
10:39, 23 February 2013 (UTC)
Hi there, I was wondering if someone could advise me please.
MOS:HEADINGS states that, when naming section headers, the provisions under
WP:TITLE also apply, one of which is not to enclose titles in quotes. But what about when a section discusses, say, a single TV episode or song? Per
MOS:QUOTEMARKS, the titles of these kinds of works are usually contained within quotation marks.
I'm asking specifically about
this article, which contains three section each about three different TV episodes. I naturally put the titles of these episodes in quotes in the section headers, but now, having reread MOS:HEADINGS, I'm not so sure that this was the correct move. There is also a section about a related TV series, the header for which is in italics. Is this okay?
I can find a couple of high profile featured articles that included both quotation marks and italics in their section headers (e.g.
The Beatles and
Michael Jackson), so I'm a little unsure about whether I have been fulfiling the MOS or not. Any advice would be appreciated. Thanks very much in advance.
A Thousand Doors (
talk |
contribs)
15:21, 19 February 2013 (UTC)
Hello.
I posted a proposal to deprecate the disproportionate usage of "initialism" on Wikipedia, which I confess I thought would meet much less resistance, as little more than a mere application of WP:JARGON and supported by WP:V.
I have since lost hope, but I'm still interested in your opinions. Thanks. 219.79.74.254 ( talk) 13:24, 21 February 2013 (UTC)
@CBM: "we, as editors, are writing in our native language"? Are we? I'm not... and I presume I'm still welcome. This is not the English speaking people Encyclopedia, nor the English World Encyclopedia, it is the English version of the Worldwide Encyclopedia that everyone can edit. Even if from Portugal, and a native speaker/writer of Portuguese. That issue aside, I think you, and Blueboar, are mostly correct over the rest. - Nabla ( talk) 00:05, 22 February 2013 (UTC)
Because of examples like the incessant editwar at History of physics as reported at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Dates and numbers#Another BC vs BCE edit war, where the MoS's wishy-washiness at Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Dates and numbers#Era style is leading to protracted editwarring, and cases like Celtiberians where use of "BC" lead to confusing absurdity (the Celtiberian culture entirely pre-dated Christianity, so this religion and the dating nomenclature used by it is completely irrelevant to the WP article in question, as they are in articles on various world religions, and, well, anything not involving Christianity as an important aspect of the topic), I propose that this section needs to be reworded to provide clearer advice.
I propose that its first three lines be changed from:
- By default, years are numbered according to the Western Dionysian era (also referred to as the Common Era).
- AD and BC are the traditional ways of referring to these eras. CE and BCE are common in some scholarly and religious writing. Either convention may be appropriate.
- Do not change the established era style in an article unless there are reasons specific to its content. Seek consensus on the talk page before making the change. Open the discussion under a subhead that uses the word "era". Briefly state why the style is inappropriate for the article in question. A personal or categorical preference for one era style over the other is not justification for making a change.
to
- By default, years are numbered according to the Western Dionysian Era, also referred to as the Common Era.
- While AD and BC are traditional ways of referring to dates within and before this era, respectively, CE and BCE have become increasingly common in scholarly works, non-Christian religious writing, and other material in which Christianity is not a central topic. Either convention may be appropriate in a particular article.
- Do not change the established era style in an article unless there are reasons specific to its content. The most common reason is whether or not Christianity has strong ties to the article topic. As with any potentially controversial change, it is recommended that editors seek consensus on the talk page before making the change. Open the discussion under a subheading that uses the word "era". Briefly state why the current style is inappropriate for the article in question. A personal preference for one era style over the other, or a categorical preference that is not tied to the content of the article or the nature of its subject, is not justification for making a change.
(Aside from making the obvious change to advise against BC/AD in articles unconnected to Christianity and BCE/CE in articles that are clearly connected to Christianity, it fixes a few minor wording problems as well.)
I would like to invite community commentary on this idea, the goal of which is to reduce confusion, prevent editwars, and head off attempts by fans of one style or the other to effectively WP:OWN dating topics by being the first major contributors to go around sticking dates in innumerable stub articles. There are usually good reasons to use one style or the other, and reducing this to a first major contributor "land grab" is not helpful to the project. Please note that the wording does not suggest that BE/BCE is the default, it simply minimizes the extant strong implication that AD/BC is the default, a position that has never reached consensus at all and has always met with stiff opposition, on many bases, from conflict with the standard used in almost all modern scientific and many if not most academic non-science reliable sources, to blatant religious offensiveness to non-Christians, an obvious WP:NPOV and WP:BIAS problem. The change would not give blanket license to force, say, History of Spain or Roman Britain to BCE/CE dating, even if it turned out that most modern, in-print publications were doing so (which is doubtful outside of archaeology, but that's not the point), since Christianity is an important aspect of both of those topics. It would, however, prevent early editors from forever saddling topics like History of China, Machu Picchu, Julius Caesar, etc., with AD/BC dates inappropriately simply because they got there first. The proposed change is intended to be non-trivial but balanced, and respectful of the valid reasons for using either style appropriately. The change is inspired by the spirit of WP:ENGVAR, which is centered on a national variety of English having "strong ties" to the article subject.
Note that this draft language and is expected to be tweaked as the discussion progresses. Please do not reflexively toss up an "Oppose" !vote because of a disagreement with a word or two (nor knee-jerk support because you like part of it but are having to forcey ourself to ignore part of it that could be problematic). A poll/survey is not even needed at this stage, but a consensus discussion on how best to address the obvious and sometimes silly problems the current wording is calling and the more serious protracted editwars resulting from them. Please do not post counter-proposals, but work toward consensus on a single proposal everyone can agree to.
—
SMcCandlish
Talk⇒ ɖ⊝כ⊙þ
Contrib.
14:16, 5 February 2013 (UTC)
−
Academic preciousness and distaste for Christianity is no reason for us to put our thumbs on the culture's scales (howevermuch we, as presumably active and involved editors, may inordinately represent that establishment). The pages that have this style argument will have them, consensus will develop, and that will be much better all around than attempts at antireligiously-based prescriptivism. — LlywelynII 20:08, 6 February 2013 (UTC)(a) BC/AD is massively more common (and simply more appropriate) when referencing the Dionysian era;
(b) BCE/CE is pointy, distracting, and should be generally discounted;
(c) except when a non-Christian religious tradition has a strong(er) tie to the article topic.
Oppose because none of it makes any sense to me and i'm only here because RFC Bot sent me an invitation however the majority of people here believe it will not be beneficial and these are the people who have an idea of it so who am i to question those who understand? MIVP - (Can I Help?) (Maybe a bit of tea for thought?) 16:38, 19 February 2013 (UTC)
This wording is longer and would lead to more arguments. Also, much like yards v Metres or ENGVAR there is a very good reason to stick to first mover advantage, not only is it simple but it keeps it consistent with those systems. What we really should do is make this a user option and allow people to choose whether Wikipedia displays to them as AD/BC or CE/BCE. That would be simpler and fundamentalists on both sides would have won. Ideally we'd also do this with ENGVAR and measurements. Mediawiki has the technology for this - it is used on the Chinese WP to display one of three different character sets. We should deploy that on EN wiki. Ϣere SpielChequers 00:16, 21 February 2013 (UTC)
*Good grief... What on Earth are we to do when we inevitably run out of inflammatory inconsequentialities to belabour each other with, instead of getting some work done? I prefer the CE and BCE convention myself, simply because it is accurately descriptive and one of the operative terms in the description happens to be "Common". However, I grew up using the terms BC and AD, so I am comfortable with them. I strongly oppose using any other standard dating convention in English in discussing topics where they are not specifically relevant; for instance BP is appropriate in palaeontology and certain branches of remote archaeology, and Muslim and Judaic calendars dates might well prove convenient in certain historical and religious contexts, but to predicate the choice of convention on sentiment where everybody's sentimental attachment is someone else's sentimental abhorrence is futile, on some people's ignorance when they cannote even look up BCE or CE on WP when they actually are in WP, and on religious topics where the topics are not at issue, and in fact completely irrelevant, does no one's faith any favours. In case anyone's literacy does extend to such competence, we could blue-link BCE and CE to accommodate them; if it does not extend blue links, we don't need to accommodate them. Personally I am not much bothered with the wording as it stands, and quite happy with the proposed change, but I think I must go along with Peter coxhead, simply in the light of the nauseating outpouring of venom foregoing (and no doubt to follow). JonRichfield ( talk) 08:52, 22 February 2013 (UTC)
Hello, all. Another editor and I would like some clarification on WP:MOSIM. I've been suggesting at Talk:Ludwig Adolph Timotheus Radlkofer#Image placement that since the MOS states we must begin each article with a right-aligned image, it has always been my impression that this is true even in cases where the lead image is of a person where facing away from the text when placed on the right, even though another provision of MOSIM is that it is often preferable to place face images so that they look into the text. The other editor in the discussion suggests that neither provision trumps the other and he can place the lead image on the left since it looks into the text that way. If consensus is for the former position, even though it may be widely understood, perhaps adding "unless it is the lead image or in an infobox" clause to the face image point to MOSIM would be a good measure. Cheers, Rkitko ( talk) 14:17, 18 February 2013 (UTC)
A quietly perennial topic has popped back up at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Wales#Lead sentences in Welsh history bios, but has nothing in particular to do with Welsh, and trying to set a WP:LOCALCONSENSUS there will be, as usual in such cases, pointless or worse. In broadened terms, the issue is whether genuinely patronymic names should be glossed (translated) into English at some point in the article on the topic (I have to assert that the answer is an obvious "yes"), and if so, how. (The discussion at that project has already moved past "whether" into "how".) There are multiple proposals for how to do this, none of them mutually exclusive:
'''X patronymic Y''' (X son of Y)
. Exact appearance will necessarily vary on a case-by-case basis, as determined by pre-existing style rules (and we probably needn't give all of these kinds of examples, though doing so might not hurt):
'''X patronymic Y''' (X son of Y)
'''X patronymic Y''' ('''X son of Y''')
X patronymic Y (X son of Y)
'''X son of Y''' ([[FOO language|FOOian]]: ''X patronymic Y'')
'''X son of Y''' ([[FOO language|FOOian]]: '''''X patronymic Y''''')
{{FOOname|X|Y}}
,
hatnote at the top of the aritcle, which would render something like: This is a
FOO name. It means "X son of Y". (An existing example is the {{
Welsh name}}
template, which handles "daughter of" cases as well.)X patronymic Y<!--X son of Y-->
{{Infobox:FOO-bio}}
(if such an
infobox template exists for that language/culture); it could be done simply by adding a parenthetical to the |name=
or by adding a new parameter.The lead sentence form X patronymic Y (English: "X son of Y") has also been proposed, but does not agree with how we handle translation into English generally.
— SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ɖ⊝כ⊙þ Contrib. 22:33, 20 February 2013 (UTC) Updated: 23:27, 20 February 2013 (UTC)
Myself, I would prefer the default to be X son of Y (FOO: X patronymic Y) for explanatory and stylistic reasons. You seemed to support that at the Welsh discussion, but I understand people feel it might be confusing or run afoul of Common Name issues. In the absence of that, I would prefer X patronymic Y ("X son of Y") without the need to specify that the patently English text is, in fact, English.
Any thoughts on smart/dumb quotes? — LlywelynII 22:58, 20 February 2013 (UTC)
With regards to this and this, and in general, isn't this whole "shorter than five letters" notion leading to inconsistent, illogical results? And where does it come from? (like, what's the reference work for [English-language and otherwise] title capitalization out there?)
I mean, as is, when in mid-title, it produces things like this:
"than", "from", "till", "Until" – ... from ... Until... looks weird, does it not?
To conform to this, From Dusk Till Dawn had [rightly] just been changed to From Dusk till Dawn – problem is, it seems to be spelled From Dusk Till Dawn virtually everywhere else (a similar case would be Stranger than Fiction vs. IMDb's Stranger Than Fiction);
also, it's still Wait Until Dark, although "until" is just a one-letter-longer variant form of "till".
But if "till" were changed to "Till", we'd still have the lowercase "from", making for constructions like ... from ... Until... and ... from ... Till....
Changing "Until" to lowercase in turn would then be at variance with a whole host of other five-letters-or-longer prepositions and conjunctions.
Seriously, what the heck? I'm confused out of my mind... – ὁ οἶστρος ( talk) 15:15, 29 November 2012 (UTC)
Capitalize the main words in a title and the first and last word, but do not capitalize a, the, to, or prepositions and conjunctions of fewer than five letters when they occur in the middle of the title.
The classic system is to capitalize the initial letters of the first and last words of a title or subtitle, as well as all major (or "significant") words. Do not capitalize articles (a, an, the), conjunctions (and, but, if) or short prepositions (at, in, on, of) unless they begin the title.
The use of capital, or uppercase, letters is determined by custom. They are used to call attention to certain words, such as proper nouns and the first word of a sentence.
Capitalize the initial letters of the first and last words of the title of a book, an article, a play, or a film, as well as all major words in the title. Do not capitalize articles (a, an, the) or coordinating conjunctions (and, but, for, or, nor, yet, so), unless they bigin or end the title (The Lives of a Cell). Capitalize propositions within titles only when they contain more than four letters (Between, Within, Until, After), unless you are following a style that recommends otherwise.
What I find interesting about all these style guides is that the question isn't really what to do with four character prepositions, it's what to do with five-and-longer ones. I think all of them would have "over" be in lower case, but some of them simply say that prepositions should be in lower case, and give no different rule for longer ones.— Kww( talk) 15:13, 11 December 2012 (UTC)
While I personally think we should just go the IMDb way (as ungainly as some of the titles there look) and style everything according to the guidelines used there, to take JHunterJ up on his proposal, how about modifying WP:NCCAPS to accommodate for these spelling versions?:
[proposed by ὁ οἶστρος:]
[proposed by JHunterJ:]
Would be a compromise / hybrid of "both worlds": even more lowercasing but at the same time allowing for some exceptions to avoid counter-intuitive "butt-ugliness". – ὁ οἶστρος ( talk) 12:49, 12 December 2012 (UTC)
Commment. This discussion seems to be quite film-centric, and maybe isn't taking fully into account the requirements of other projects that have prominent usage of composition titles, but surely we should be discussing any changes in terms of published style guides, and which we should take our lead from, rather than in terms of what other websites do. -- Rob Sinden ( talk) 13:49, 19 December 2012 (UTC)
To respond to the original post, I have no idea where the "five letter" so-called rule came from, and disagree with it (and wonder who added it, with what supposed consensus), but it's a moot point. We don't change the titles of published works, last I looked, if they are consistently done a particular way. Now, if movie posters for From Dusk Till Dawn sometimes spelled it "till", we'd have a case for applying MOS's lower-casing rule, but otherwise we don't. — SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ɖ∘¿¤þ Contrib. 02:25, 24 December 2012 (UTC)
SMcCandlish, as shown at the very beginning of this section, Wikipedians, such as many of those assessing RMs, for example, clearly do not follow what you put forward, but instead point out that the MoS was "quite clear about this" – and why should they not?, as the MoS is clear on that point, only that it advocates, well, [at the very least] questionable rules for that point to begin with, in my opinion. (and, yeah, I won't contest the fine by the style police for the æsthetically challenged overuse in close succession of words deriving from the same root, and will instead only point at myself)
(Incidentally, I don't see a need for opening the can of worms – as I don't think it's as clear-cut as some seem convinced – of where the line between style and substance, the formal and the material, is to be drawn.)
There seems to be agreement (among the few participants in this discussion) that the current title capitalization rules are insufficient / subpar. So, where to go from here? What formal steps are there to be taken? While I don't know my way around the procedural parts of Wikipedia, what I can do is repeat, sum up and juxtapose the three options currently on the discoursive table, so that it can be presented in a bit less unwieldy and more neatly fashion for further consideration (although it's certainly not meant to replace the much more detailed and comprehensive debate proper).
But first, let me object to the claim that what's proposed here were film-centric approaches. I dont see that at all. To me – and I've yet to hear a cogent argument contradicting this –, work titles are work titles are work titles (yeah, we style TV series titles differently from episode titles, but you get the gist), and the rules suggested can be applied (and are widely applied) unreservedly to songs, sheet music, books, articles, video games, what have you (again, see the [short, unrepresentative and unsystematic] laundry list of publications I give a few posts above this one) – and for all, there are some quirky specimens that elude easy classification, that therefore can be controversial and for which there has to be made a case-by-case decision on how to represent them. (Like, is it "Se7en" or "Seven"?) Sure, I mostly (but not exclusively, as correctly indicated by JHunterJ) use[d] film titles for illustrative purposes here, but I might just as well have chosen song or poem or declaration or manifesto titles.
Oh, and, please, no more accusations of me wanting "whimsical" solutions:
For one, adding to JHunterJ's voice, it's been declared here numerous times before that the MoS is its very own, independent entity that draws non-exclusive inspiration heavily from a multitude of renowned – and sometimes conflicting – normative guides without following, adopting and adapting everything from all or any particular one of them (whether that's right / appropriate / wise or not is another matter to be examined separately).
Apart from that, it's obvious to anyone who really read what I wrote that I amply, over and over, many, many [many, many, ...] times repeatedly expressly declared that I would like to see authoritative sources on the matter and certainly wouldn't mind the MoS to be grounded on such.
There has been some chiming in, but I'm still mostly left in the dark as to what (singular or plural) both Wikipedia's MoS and the breadth of respected publications I enumerated base their capitalization on – and since the former goes against virtually all of the latter (and at times even against the BFI, the sole "contrarian" in the mix), if anything, it seems to me, it's the current practice at Wikipedia that might be termed "whimsical"...
IMDb serves as just one widely recognized and vastly influential (irrespective of what one personally might think of them) exponent that uses a way of displaying titles that (assuming – and conceivably incorrectly so – that it's everywhere identical down to the minutiæ) seems to be the predominant one the world over (it also makes sense to look at what IMDb does in light of the fact that they surely must obsess over spelling, as it's a, no, the vital part of their business, on which hinges quite everything for them).
Anyway, here are the three main types of capitalization rules weighed so far (NB: what follows is not worded in a manner fit for inclusion into the MoS; it's still about gauging the what? before taking on the how?, though shots at drafting something usable are naturally always welcome):
Or, by way of examples:
Still open (well, for the person adding it, anyway):
[added by
ὁ οἶστρος:]
[add what else comes to mind] – ὁ οἶστρος ( talk) 18:40, 8 January 2013 (UTC)
Some quick thoughts. Scjessey, thanks for the link. However, according to your source, "[...], The Associated Press would have you capitalize prepositions and conjunctions if they are four or more letters long." [bolding by me] – or in other words, the AP propagates (again, according to dailywritingtips.com) a "shorter than four letters rule" (which is not what WP:MoS currently prescribes), resulting in ... Into ..., ... Over ... and ... Upon ... (just like as seen at IMDb etc.), but also in ... From ... and ... With ... (unlike what's at IMDb etc.); but then again, maybe those rules are more intricate and dailywritingtips.com simply conveys them wrongly. This wouldn't surprise me, as they also feature this:
"Sentence case, or down style, is one method, preferred by many print and online publications and recommended by the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association. The only two rules are the two rules mentioned above: Capitalize the first word and all proper nouns. Everything else is in lowercase. For example: Why it’s never too late to learn grammar (all words lowercased except “Why”—first word in title)"
This seems to be misrepresenting APA in general or is at the very least confusing, as it doesn't mention APA's approach to titles. While I couldn't find much of anything useful concerning major style guides with unrestricted access online, I did stumble upon this (see p. 48). Recommending for titles what they call "Headline-Style Capitalization", the APA actually seems to say (what follows is out of the 2011 edition of the Pocket Guide to APA Style, an inofficial sorta "Reader's Digest" version of the real thing),
"[...]; capitalize all other words except articles, to (as part of an infinitive phrase), and conjunctions or prepositions of three or fewer letters." [again, bolding by me]
This again gives [among others] the weird ... From ... and ... With ... constructs (again, if represented accurately by that source).
Robsinden wrote, "we should not be arbitrarily inventing our own style guide". To basically repeat what I wrote several times before: If we already are following an amalgamation of several style guides (it does not seem to be "CMoS + AP", though), I don't see any methodological difference between that and my "proposition 3" (whether I would actually prefer that to what IMDb and others do, I'm not yet sure myself). – ὁ οἶστρος ( talk) 18:46, 14 January 2013 (UTC)
And just to demonstrate the point [6]. -- MASEM ( t) 05:58, 30 January 2013 (UTC)
(
ὁ οἶστρος (
talk)
13:23, 30 January 2013 (UTC):)
To unify two discussions basically dealing with the same issues, the following was transferred here from
its original location at the
talk page for MoS:CAPS:
4-letter prepositions in composition titles
WP:CT is clear that only prepositions of five letters or more should have their first letter capitalized, but I've never seen an uncapitalized four-letter preposition in a title that didn't look wrong. The aforementioned Star Trek RM touches on this; it's definitely against CT, but it just looks sloppy and doesn't appear that way in most sources. I'm not the type to prefer source styling over MOS styling, though, so would anyone be amenable to expanding CT to capitalize four-letter prepositions? And don't tell me how much work that would entail—just whether it would be right or wrong, please. -- BDD ( talk) 17:33, 11 December 2012 (UTC)
- It would suffer from the same problem with different words, such as "with" and "from" ( View from the Top, It Came from Beneath the Sea, The Man with the Golden Gun, etc.) I think an explicit list is in order if the rule is to be changed, capitalizing some four-letter prepositions and leaving others uncapitalized. Maybe even capitalize some three-letter prepositions, as we already do in 33⅓ Revolutions Per Monkee. -- JHunterJ ( talk) 12:40, 12 December 2012 (UTC)
- Glad to see someone's talking about this. We've digressed on the "Into" argument regarding Star Trek, and we've opened a whole new can of worms. If, as some sources are suggesting, "into" becomes part of a phrasal verb, should it be capitalised according to the MOS? As far as we can see, it should. If that is the case, there are many articles (see a massive list of examples in the Star Trek discussion, some of which qualify) that may also need the "into" capitalised. Might it be wise for us to discuss the existence of phrasal verbs, and how this affects capitalisation? drewmunn ( talk) 12:56, 18 December 2012 (UTC)
- Can you provide an example of a phrasal verb using "into"? (The Star Trek problem, IMO, is not one of phrasal-verbness, but instead stems from the use of a subtitle "Into Darkness" without the normal colon or dash or other indication; clever marketing, perhaps, but lousy style; as a sentence, "Star trek into darkness" doesn't work so well, so "Star Trek into Darkness" doesn't either, but neither does "Star Trek Into Darkness"; I'd go with "Star Trek: Into Darkness", and ignore their marketing style. But I realize that perspective is probably just one of many in that discussion.) -- JHunterJ ( talk) 14:08, 18 December 2012 (UTC)
- Crash into Me and I'm into Something Good are two examples of the word being used as particles of the verb and should be capitalized, but aren't. There are many more. I also found Run Into the Light as one example of "into" being capitalized in a title, yet I'm not really sure it should be since it does look like it's being used as a preposition there. -- DocNox ( talk) 23:55, 18 December 2012 (UTC)
- Whay should "Crash into Me" be capitalised? I don't think this is a phrasal verb. The verb is "to crash", "into" is just the preposition. Not sure about "I'm into Something Good" though - maybe in this context "to be into" is a phrasal verb. "Run into the Light" shouldn't be capitalised though, unless it is about a chance encounter with the light! -- Rob Sinden ( talk) 09:00, 19 December 2012 (UTC)
- ( edit conflict) Be careful as to what is a phrasal verb and what isn't. "Trek into" wouldn't be a phrasal verb. In this example, "trek" is the verb, and "into" the preposition. However, "run into", as in accidentally meet some one, would be a phrasal verb, and in this example "into" should be capitalised in a composition title. However if you "ran into" a shop to get something, this is not a phrasal verb. -- Rob Sinden ( talk) 14:10, 18 December 2012 (UTC)
- As far as a general phrasal verb goes, "trek into" isn't one. I'm not talking about specifically Star Trek - that's a more complicated problem. -- Rob Sinden ( talk) 09:00, 19 December 2012 (UTC)
- Having read what you've put forward so far, it's straightened stuff out for me a little more. I agree now that "trek into" in it's pure form probably can't be a phrasal verb; as you say, it doesn't really have extra meaning when combined. "Star Trek Into", however, probably could be, if you take it to mean the franchise gets dark. However, as you said, that complex and not really for this discussion. I know it's simplistic and probably too broad, but as suggested earlier by BDD, could we expand CT to cover "Into"? As suggested by JHunterJ, I don't think all 4-letter prepositions need CT, but some, specifically "into" could probably do with it. It would deal with all cases without the argument on a case-by-case basis. drewmunn ( talk) 09:11, 19 December 2012 (UTC)
- But what would be the justification for tmaking a special exception for "into"? Surely it should follow the same rules as every other preposition. -- Rob Sinden ( talk) 09:15, 19 December 2012 (UTC)
- Other than avoiding arguments such as the Star Trek one, I have nothing. drewmunn ( talk) 09:17, 19 December 2012 (UTC)
- The suggestion at WT:MOS#WP:NCCAPS → "shorter than five letters" rule is to abandon the letter-counting approach to preposition capitalization and instead identify which prepositions get capitalized and which don't. It wouldn't be a "special exception" for any of them. -- JHunterJ ( talk) 13:30, 19 December 2012 (UTC)
- I wasn't aware of that discussion, but I'm against the proposed changes! -- Rob Sinden ( talk) 13:42, 19 December 2012 (UTC)
- If it is an established system of usage of the English language, then it's fine, but editors seem to be cobbling together rules based on examples given on other websites, rather than respecting long established guidelines of usage. We should be discussing which guideline to follow in these cases, not make up our own. -- Rob Sinden ( talk) 14:05, 19 December 2012 (UTC)
I remember some rule from somewhere (sorry, that's not helpful to anyone), that prepositions with more than one syllable should be capitalized. Thus, "from" and "with" (examples given above) are both one syllable long, while "into" (the other example from above), "wherefore" (although, this exceeds WP's 5-letter rule) are two syllables and should be capitalized. Would this be helpful in this debate, and would it be a helpful rule in Wikipedia MOS? The word "into" is unusual for being two syllables rather than one for its letter length. Also, does anyone know where this rule comes from? — al-Shimoni ( talk) 02:27, 27 January 2013 (UTC)
- A follow-up on my last (and perhaps my last comment and this should be moved to a separate thread of its own). I was looking at other four-letter English prepositions. "Upon" is a four letter preposition, but two syllables, and I noticed that it is, so-far that I have observed, consistently capitalized in wiki articles (for example, the multiple "Once Upon a Time" articles). Four-letter two-syllable prepositions include: amid (a+mid), atop (a+top), into (a shortened compound preposition), onto (shortened compound preposition), over, unto (formed by analogy of "until", a shortened compound preposition), and upon (a shortened compound preposition). The reason I point out the shortened compound prepositions is that WP asks to capitalize the first word of compound prepositions (regardless of length). That they are shortened forms, however, makes that WP rule no longer applicable (at least, as currently written). But, it seems that since 1) all the two-syllable four-letter prepositions (except over) appear to come from compounds, and 2) their two-syllable nature seems to make them want to be capitalized (and there seems to be a rule somewhere that says one should capitalize such — see previous comment by me), then a rule could easily and reasonably be created to say they should be capitalized. As a note, there are no three or shorter letter prepositions with more than one syllable.
- Proposal: Perhaps we should amend the sentence in the article which says "Prepositions that contain five letters or more (During, Through, About, Until, etc.)" to read as "Prepositions that contain five letters or more (During, Through, About, Until, etc.), or more than one syllable."
- Thoughts?
- — al-Shimoni ( talk) 03:17, 27 January 2013 (UTC)
- I like it – and I don't: there are problems. Would you mind if I copied this whole section (or parts of it) over to the ["older", longer] discussion at WT:MoS and replied to you there? That way, everything would be centrally in one place – and a place where probably more people stop by than here. – ὁ οἶστρος ( talk) 23:32, 28 January 2013 (UTC)
- I haven't had time to read this through thoroughly, but from your last comment, I think we're getting somewhere. I agree with your observation of compound prepositions, and I think it warrants a look into. As for your proposal, I think it covers the purpose well. It may need some streamlining, but in essence I think it's good. drewmunn ( talk) 12:30, 27 January 2013 (UTC)
I only just now noticed this section deals with the same issue I first brought up last November here. Everyone's input over there obviously welcome.(Crossed out because I realized the discussion I started is already mentioned and linked further up by JHunterJ. The invitation to head over to and join me at that WT:MoS section obviously still stands. Sorry for the redundancy.) – ὁ οἶστρος ( talk) 19:42, 27 January 2013 (UTC) ( ὁ οἶστρος ( talk) 22:57, 28 January 2013 (UTC))
- Is there an established style guideline that supports the theory that a two-syllable preposition is a compound preposition, or is this just synthesis? -- Rob Sinden ( talk) 09:13, 29 January 2013 (UTC)
- Except for "over", all the English 4 letter prepositions that I've seen have been shortened/contracted compounds. But being shortened, they are no longer two distinct words, thus the WP:MOS rule about a compound preposition may not apply. "Over" — from every source I have seen — originates as a single preposition (cognate to German "über"). The list of two-syllable four-letter prepositions is quite short (listed above). There are no two-syllable three-letter, 2-syll two-letter, nor (obviously) 2-syll single-letter prepositions. Capitalizing 5+ letter preps, or 2+ syllable preps would cover much of the words in dispute. — al-Shimoni ( talk) 06:35, 30 January 2013 (UTC)
- Again, would the contributors here mind if I copied this over to WT:MoS, so we'd have everything in one place? I and others could just comment on your points there and link to here to get the context, but this would obviously be very cumbersome. Since I'd copy, not cut, you still could continue debating here if that's what you prefer, but I don't know if my action would be considered impolite or seen as an attempt to hijack your thread. Thoughts? – ὁ οἶστρος ( talk) 09:32, 30 January 2013 (UTC)
al-Shimoni, your wording "Prepositions that contain five letters or more (During, Through, About, Until, etc.), or more than one syllable." would improve some titles (in my opinion), but also bring about renderings such as these:
Stranger than Fiction,
From Dusk till Dawn (while this spelling has grown on me personally, it's still at variance with widest and [semi-]official usage),
The Englishman Who Went up a Hill But Came down a Mountain or
33⅓ Revolutions per Monkee
(And what about like? Am I mistaken in my belief, that while it technically consists of two syllables, in practice – like, when employing poetic meters – it counts as one-syllable word? So how to treat it?)
Not to mention that your theory isn't style guide-sourced [yet] – and so far, neither are my [prep] props 2 and 3 (nor our MoS's current policy, for that matter).
I was mulling over and going through conceptions along the lines or "word-width" / "number of 'slim' characters", but I ran into trouble there as well – and, again, I couldn't find any authoritative guides propping up such gedankenexperiments.
Further, the crux with such "mechanistic" rules is that they don't account for "inner-language logic" / innate relationships between words (over–under, up–down, from–till/until etc.), therefore suffering themselves from a kind of "inconsistency".
While I personally don't like everything about it, I'm in the process of coming around to advocating the syle employed here (see the TOC there), above given as [prep] prop 2, also used by IMDb and seemingly the de-facto standard in professional-level publications the world over – obviously under the condition that we can establish its origin / trace it back to a suitable source. If we achieve that, then, in my opinion, this would represent the best of both worlds: it would be a systematic, sourced solution, and it would be reflective of widest common authoritative real-life usage. – ὁ οἶστρος ( talk) 13:33, 30 January 2013 (UTC)
Sorry if this has been discussed already, but this is a long section… The way I see it, we should follow the MOS unless it conflicts with real-world use. The MOS should list an explicit exception for if no or scarce reliable sources use the style dictated by the MOS, or if a non-standard style is overwhelmingly used. This includes which words are and are not capitalized. — Frungi ( talk) 17:49, 31 January 2013 (UTC)
Into, Onto, Upon, Off of are all compound adpositions. The fact that they are shortened (space removed) does not suddenly make them not-compound adpositions. Where do the rules state that compound adpositions without spaces are exempt from the "capitalize the first letter of the compound adposotion rule?" The first word in the compound preposition INTO is INTO. This is the most literal interpretation of the rule you can take. The rule did not state "take the first letter of the first word ""when the compound preposition is more than one word." People who believed this were interpreting the rule incorrectly. http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/594/02/ All compound adpositions should be capitalized, but especially Into and Onto in certain circumstances. Words like amid and until are trickier, and there needs to be more research. I'm not comfortable saying they are compound prepositions because a and un cannot be used as prepositions alone. To clarify why this is - [I Ran the Door] [I Ran in the Door] [I Ran to the Door] [I Ran Into the Door] Notice: [(I Ran in)(to the Door)] doesnt even really make sense. It means you ran up to a door and stopped next to it. [(I Ran into the Store)] and [(I Ran in the Store)] mean the same thing. This class of words are more important than standard prepositions. Into is part of the verb because INTO is what you did, not ran. You should be consulting experts and not laymen with manuals to derive your rules. If you don't understand WHY a rule works the way it works, you shouldn't be advocating it just because the manual says so. Anyone who was advocating Star Trek into Darkness, because a manual says so, needs to go back and learn the grammar behind how the rules are formed. This situation mirrors HG Wells Time Machine. The Eloy follow the war sirens but they have no idea why. Then they get slaughtered. In this case people are advocating following rules, but nobody knows why the rule exists. If you can't explain WHY the rule is the way it is, go back and research more. In short: Onto and Into should be capitalized in titles, regardless of other rules, but especially when the presence of to changes the meaning of the sentence. They involve motion and they are compound prepositions. All compound prepositions (even the ones with spaces removed) should be capitalized, but ESPECIALLY when removing to changes the meaning of the sentence or fragment. "Star Trek in Darkness" is not synonymous with "Star Trek Into Darkness", thus Into should be capitalized. It would be moronic to claim that "The Empire: Strikes Back" should be punctuated that way just because Empire is bigger on the poster. The same rule would apply to Run in the Park and Run Into the Park. But not Run in to the Store and Run in the Store. The MOS is wrong if it does not take these situations into account. Rules like how many letters a word has are inadequate, broken, and harmful to Wikipedia. Xkcdreader ( talk) 13:20, 3 February 2013 (UTC)
As there has been little progress here lately and – with regards to the present state of affairs – I've already said (sometimes more than once) most of what there was to be said on my part, and since the amount of time that I can dedicate to discussing this will be limited for the nonce (while keeping up what I mostly do at Wikipedia anyway: reading and some WikiGnoming), [save for some major new developments] there likely won't be many more postings from me on this going forward. I'll take WT:MoS off my watchlist, so if anyone'd like to address me over something, please do so via my talk page, as otherwise I won't be aware of it.
Now, I'm sure you couldn't care less whether I'm sticking around or not; the reason I'm writing this is because the majority of the admittedly few people commenting do seem to be unsatisfied with the status quo of our MoS's work title capitalization rules, the disagreement apparently being mainly not on the that [we change them], but on the how [we change them]. So I hereby express my hope that someone will pick up the cause and prevent this section from being auto-archived after seven days (maybe there's a tag to achieve that, but I wouldn't know what it's called, nor whether I'd be authorized to use it).
My own opinion on what to go with oscillated between what I ended up calling "[prep] prop 2" and "[prep] prop 3". Since then, I've come around to favoring [prep] prop 2 – not because I personally like every aspect of it, but because, to me, it appears to be most in tune with real-world use by far (for all kinds of work titles). For although following CMoS's advice certainly would make for the simplest and, in a way, most logical prescriptions (correction: that title actually belongs to the method that capitalizes all words in a title, à la "Across The Alley From The Alamo" – just as ugly as what CMoS does, but much more prevalent) (all prepositions, regardless of length or other criteria, are lower-cased), that's just not what's done by the brunt of the major authoritative publishers (of newspapers, magazines, [fiction and non-fiction] books, sheet music, press material etc. pp.) out there. I predict even more challenges to the validity and jurisdiction of our MoS if we were to replace the "shorter than five letters" rule with CMoS's "lower-case all prepositions". And, I mean, anecdotally, An Essay concerning Human Understanding anyone? That just doesn't correspond to actual usage. And I guess I needn't really mention that the whole Star Trek Into Débâcle (and that one link given was before the tidings of the xkcd comic strip hit that talk page) would not have happened, had [prep] prop 2 been in effect (and, pre-emptively, no, it wasn't merely about whether or not the second part can be seen as an implied subtitle – see this whole discussion for illustrative purposes; and does anybody really believe that if From Dusk Till Dawn was released today the backlash would be any different from what went down in the Star Trek situation?). I'm not saying [prep] prop 2 will never lead to problems, but the number of instances would be greatly reduced. Also, with the MoS's capitalization rules being more in harmony with reality, a large chunk of the currently constant "who trumps whom" (WP:AT ↔ WP:MoS and so forth) bickering could be dispensed with as well.
Granted, save for someone suddenly stepping forward (sadly hasn't happened so far), if we were to go down that road, we might well have to resign ourselves to the fact (if it is a fact) that there either, a), really is no good style guide which this seemingly widest-of-all way of capitalizing work titles is grounded on, or that, b), it does exist but could potentially remain elusive for a very long time, pending a find.
By a), I mean it's conceivable for [prep] prop 2 to have developed from a general "capitalize important words" into what is today the de-facto standard, really (this is pure speculation, obviously). If so, isn't there a case to be made for something that has become a sorta benchmark, a best practice (leading to often quasi-[semi-]official title styling), passed on as a tradition, even if probably mostly without the knowledge where it's originated from / what it's based on? I mean, it's here, does it really devaluate the result if its genesis is shrouded in darkness? Think of it as a customary usage argument, think of customary law in jurisprudence, where something can become "law" / can gain [quasi-]legal status by mere continued constant application, no matter the roots. And what's more important for a guide, reliably demonstrable usage or a halfway-decently sourced set of rules that no one uses outside Wikipedia? (and I ain't so sure the MoS as is is implicitly well sourced on every point in the first place, though it's hard to tell since hardly any actual references are given anywhere)
I would very much prefer the circumstances to be different and have both, wide practical usage and a solid theoretical foundation said wide usage is based on, but, alas, the latter seems unattainable for the time being.
However, since there is an abundance of reliable, published sources that use the style of [prep] prop 2, therefore indirectly confirming its existence (precisely by applying that style / showing it "in action"), I'm confident its inclusion would not constitute original research.
In short, I hereby would like to recommend the adoption of the principles stated in [prep] prop 2 (while naturally retaining grammatically justified and explicated constructional exceptions, such as capitalizing on etc. when part of a phrasal verb). – ὁ οἶστρος ( talk) 14:40, 13 February 2013 (UTC)
for ease of reference, in repetition of a passage further up, this is what [prep] prop 2 says:
save for their position at the beginning or end of a title, these English-language words must begin with a lower-case letter:
a, an, and, as, at, by, for, from, in, of, on, or, the, to, with
(see also the list with examples)
—added by Frungi ( talk) 19:44, 15 February 2013 (UTC) / ὁ οἶστρος ( talk) 09:13, 16 February 2013 (UTC)
Should there be no or not enough or not yet enough support for this approach to work title capitalization, I'd appreciate it if someone kept this debate alive and saw it through to its conclusion. – ὁ οἶστρος ( talk) 14:40, 13 February 2013 (UTC)
This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
Archive 130 | ← | Archive 135 | Archive 136 | Archive 137 | Archive 138 | Archive 139 | Archive 140 |
In the entry for the film For lung (as of 2013-01-24T12:47:10), a Hollywood Reporter quote reads (bolding by me), "Any real thought about the nature of duty and the law is swept aside for action, action, and more action-which is average for Lam [...]". Also, the corresponding article title is styled "Fire of Conscience -- Film Review". Are these two instances of hyphens-for-dashes usage to be corrected? Or must they be left alone, because they're integral to the source? – ὁ οἶστρος ( talk) 13:46, 24 January 2013 (UTC)
at Wikipedia_talk:Manual_of_Style/Pronunciation. The proposal (I think) is that we change the MOS to recommend moving pronunciations out of the lead. (Personally, and it would seem others agree, I think this is part of a larger problem with clutter per MOS:LEAD that I've tried addressing before.) — kwami ( talk) 01:09, 27 January 2013 (UTC)
How proper is it for an editor to make blanket changes to an article in keeping with WP:CONSISTENCY. For example, if an article uses half "color" and half "colour", but also "center" and perhaps an "armour", would we go back to the first non-stub from however many years prior and decide that everything is BrE or AmE and then change everything accordingly? Or would it be proper to change one word (for example making all "color"s to "colour" for sake of consistency) but retaining the rest (such as "center", so long as that was as its first used spelling). Thank you. - Kai445 ( talk) 17:22, 27 January 2013 (UTC)
Hello. We seem to need help with religious titles and honorifics. I please request that we discuss, achieve a consensus and write down guidelines. Please see the talk page of the article Gandhi for more details, regarding a proposed move to Mahatma Gandhi. Here is an excerpt from that conversation:
I have reverted an addition to the page, with this edit summary: "Revert addition of this text to the provisions for ellipses: '(This section does not apply to mathematical notion.)' [sic]; editors, please do not make substantive changes like that without discussing them first; and DO leave informative edit summaries♥". The editor then reverted my reversion, rather than discussing the change; so I reverted the edit again. In my edit summary I use the annotation "[sic]". Given the absence of the definite article ("to [the] mathematical notion"), it is not certain which of the following was intended:
1. (This section does not apply to the mathematical notion.)
2. (This section does not apply to mathematical notation.)
In my own opinion, neither version is warranted. 1 is unnecessary, since the context shows that the "elongated circles" of mathematics are plainly not the topic; and 2 is just not true. Let others have their say also.
Noetica Tea? 01:53, 3 February 2013 (UTC)
x + 1, x + 2, ..., x + n
Just in case there's any confusion, there is no rule requiring that anyone discuss changes before making them. It's often wise on pages like this one, but it is not required. Takuya does not need anyone's permission to edit the MoS, just like Noetica did not need anyone's permission to revert the change. Darkfrog24 ( talk) 04:45, 4 February 2013 (UTC)
Is there anything special that needs to be done for massive (100+ long) reference sections? The list at List of dog breeds is already 100 entries long, and if the working copy in my sandbox is anything to go by, will probably have closer to 500 or 600 citations before the listings for each breed is cited. Is there a way to make this list collapsible or otherwise smaller that complies with the MOS? -- TKK bark ! 13:41, 4 February 2013 (UTC)
Is there clear guidance on the best practice for designating infobox items which may be either singular or plural? Some infoboxs use the parenthetical (s); sometimes they have a space between the singular form and the (s), and some are displayed without space(s), some use a singular form even though they often have multiple entries, and still others use the plural form even if only one entry is included. WP:PLURALS is mute on the subject, and I think we should have a standard. Comments are needed, thank you.— My76 Strat • talk • email • purge 11:18, 31 January 2013 (UTC)
A large number of article titles use and capitalise the string "AT-LARGE" when it is not the first word of the title, e.g. Georgia's At-large congressional district special election, 1819, New York's At-large congressional seat. An apparently smaller number of articles do not capitalise the string, e.g. Georgia's at-large congressional district special election, 1813. In the text of these articles, I have only seen lowercase "at-large". Does the MOS or some more specific page have a preference for which capitalisation should be used in the titles, and in the texts of the articles? I have posted short notices pointing to this discussion on MOS:CAPS and WP:AT. -sche ( talk) 16:47, 6 February 2013 (UTC)
The question was raised at the above board and hasn't received any answer. I was also involved in the reverts, and have been looking for the policy that I common sense applied to do it, that is, "We should use what the source says". I will copy the question here and ask for any input you may have:
Gtwfan52 ( talk) 21:55, 7 February 2013 (UTC)
You are invited to join the discussion at Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/Dirtlawyer1. -- Trevj ( talk) 19:56, 10 February 2013 (UTC) (post-note reword, per WP:REFACTOR) -- Trevj ( talk) 19:56, 10 February 2013 (UTC)
AFAICT the problem SMcCandlish is highlighting [ above is a misunderstand of what the MOS covers. The MOS covers the usage within articles, its prescriptions do not necessarily cover article titles and it should have little to say about article titles because that is an issue for the AT policy and its naming conventions. Whether the capitalisation as proposed in the MOS is followed, or whether the capitalisation as proposed by some projects, comes down to the guidance in the naming conventions not in the MOS. As anyone who has followed the recent debate on the talk page of the AT policy must be aware by now WP:AT is based on weighing up the usage in reliable sources and several other criteria, one of which is the guidance given in the naming convention of capital letters, but that guidance may not be followed in all cases if the capitalisation of article titles about certain fauna, flora, ships or whatever is stylistically different form that in the MOS. -- PBS ( talk) 10:20, 7 February 2013 (UTC)
In titles we capitalize the first word of every title, and every other word as it appears in running text.– well, this is the point of contention at Wikipedia talk:Article titles#RfC on COMMONSTYLE proposal, where the debate seems about evenly divided to me, certainly with no clear consensus as yet. My interpretation of WP:AT (and PBS's if I understand it) is that you have stated it the wrong way round. In running text we capitalize as in the title, except for the first word which may be lowercased when not at the start of a sentence. First the title, determined by WP:AT, then the running text, determined by the title. It seems a logical order, given that it's the way one writes a new article. Peter coxhead ( talk) 18:42, 7 February 2013 (UTC)
There are those who instead argue that AT "trumps" MOS because it's a policy not a guideline, and thus that MOS should simply be ignored in such a case, regardless of the textual inconsistencies that will result within the article and between the article and other articles. This view badly misunderstands how
Wikipedia policy operates, and how policies and guidelines interact and differ (and don't differ). It's a
legalistic misinterpretation, a fetishizing of the word "policy". The short version is that the only thing important about AT being tagged with {{
policy}}
lately (this is actually quite recent) instead of {{
guideline}}
is that now one should be a bit more certain one is doing the right thing before invoking
WP:IAR to get around some problem it may be presenting to your ability to improve the encyclopedia. If this were not the case, all guidelines would have zero effect on policies. Yet we find that
WP:COMMONSENSE strongly affects almost all of them, frequently superseding virtually any concern they raise (other than external legal ones from
WP:OFFICE like
WP:BLP matters). COMMONSENSE is just one example. MOS is another. AT and its naming convention subpages (which are not policies) derive all of their style advice explicitly from MOS and its subpages, and always have. Literally hundreds of archived discussions on those pages have made this abundantly clear. —
SMcCandlish
Talk⇒ ɖ⊝כ⊙þ
Contrib.
06:40, 8 February 2013 (UTC)
WP:AT is about choosing the title, not the styling. As I have argued elsewhere, there isn't a simple contrast between "title" and "style". Some typographic style carries no meaning (a good example is a choice between "M. R. James" and "M.R. James"). Other typographic style does convey meaning (e.g. in running text the choice between "Brewer's sparrow" and "brewer's sparrow" or "Jack pine" and "jack pine"). WP:AT makes explicit the need to balance different factors (including use in reliable sources); currently the MOS does not, but should where style interacts with meaning. Peter coxhead ( talk) 15:50, 10 February 2013 (UTC)
I think it was a mistake to refactor my comment, because it has placed it out of context and my comment was not "tangential to that topic". I would appreciate it if the person who refactored my comment would place it back where it was before it was refactored. -- PBS ( talk) 20:55, 8 February 2013 (UTC)
To respond directly to the question in the heading, "Does MOS apply to article titles?", the first heading of the MOS has, for a very long time, been, "Article titles, headings, and sections", so it seems obvious that the consensus view has been that the MOS is, at least, intended to apply to article titles. So the question should really be: are there exceptions to the general rule that the MOS applies to titles, and if so, why?. -- Boson ( talk) 11:30, 12 February 2013 (UTC)
I couldn't find this addressed in the archives, though there is advice about Yahoo! and Guess? in /Trademarks/Archive 1 and about "logical punctuation" of quotes on several archived pages.
Is there a preferred treatment for titles of television series, films, books or other titles not enclosed in quotation marks where the title ends in a question mark or an exclamation mark? Consider this sentence from Norma Mendoza-Denton.
That looks plain awkward to me, with two marks of punctuation ending the sentence. An earlier version (which I wrote) styled it this way:
It was perhaps no better, since the sentence ends with a question mark although it is not a question. Another possibility would be to remove the question mark from the title (a la Yahoo), but that seems wrong since the title itself is a yes or no question.
I anticipate that someone will advise re-writing the sentence to put the title earlier in the sentence, but then what of commas?
Adding superfluous phrases is possible, but feels like a bit of a coward's way out.
Cnilep ( talk) 06:00, 8 February 2013 (UTC)
It seems at some point there has been local consensus at MOS:MUSIC#Capitalization to deviate from the MoS given at MOS:CT regarding composition titles that include parentheses. I would invite interested editors to contribute at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Capital letters#Contradiction and divergence at MOS:MUSIC. -- Rob Sinden ( talk) 11:35, 12 February 2013 (UTC)
Stephanie Fearon has an italicised title (it should not do) but I can't work out how this was achieved. I've checked for the {{ italic title}} template in the article but couldn't find anything obviously causing the italicised title in the page code. Am just asking here to see if anyone can shed any light on this and explain how to fix it. Mabalu ( talk) 11:58, 13 February 2013 (UTC)
I recently changed Forty Martyrs of England and Wales to have a consistent spelling of the word "canonize/canonise" throughout. [3] It seemed a little counter-intuitive to use -ize in an article on a British topic, but since the topic pre-dates standardization of either British or American spelling, I figured it would be okay, and from my understanding both spellings are actually acceptable in British English, just -ise is more common. Also, the very first version of the article had been written with the -ize spelling. I was soon reverted rather sloppily, though. [4] This revert ignored all the places in the article where -ize was still in use, and reintroduced inconsistency to the article. I then fixed this with another edit to remove all but one instance of -ize. [5] The remaining instance is, unfortunately, part of Template:Infobox martyrs, which uses the "American spelling" in every article in which it is used. Any idea how to get around this? elvenscout742 ( talk) 08:09, 19 February 2013 (UTC)
canon{{
ev|ox|ize}}
, that is translated on-the-fly for logged-in users (i.e. most active editors who even know about ENGVAR). American editors would see it in American English, and British editors who hate the Oxford z wouldn't see that spelling, and thus neither would be tempted to "fix" the article to use all American spellings or all non-Oxford British spellings. —
SMcCandlish
Talk⇒ ɖ⊝כ⊙þ
Contrib.
10:39, 23 February 2013 (UTC)
Hi there, I was wondering if someone could advise me please.
MOS:HEADINGS states that, when naming section headers, the provisions under
WP:TITLE also apply, one of which is not to enclose titles in quotes. But what about when a section discusses, say, a single TV episode or song? Per
MOS:QUOTEMARKS, the titles of these kinds of works are usually contained within quotation marks.
I'm asking specifically about
this article, which contains three section each about three different TV episodes. I naturally put the titles of these episodes in quotes in the section headers, but now, having reread MOS:HEADINGS, I'm not so sure that this was the correct move. There is also a section about a related TV series, the header for which is in italics. Is this okay?
I can find a couple of high profile featured articles that included both quotation marks and italics in their section headers (e.g.
The Beatles and
Michael Jackson), so I'm a little unsure about whether I have been fulfiling the MOS or not. Any advice would be appreciated. Thanks very much in advance.
A Thousand Doors (
talk |
contribs)
15:21, 19 February 2013 (UTC)
Hello.
I posted a proposal to deprecate the disproportionate usage of "initialism" on Wikipedia, which I confess I thought would meet much less resistance, as little more than a mere application of WP:JARGON and supported by WP:V.
I have since lost hope, but I'm still interested in your opinions. Thanks. 219.79.74.254 ( talk) 13:24, 21 February 2013 (UTC)
@CBM: "we, as editors, are writing in our native language"? Are we? I'm not... and I presume I'm still welcome. This is not the English speaking people Encyclopedia, nor the English World Encyclopedia, it is the English version of the Worldwide Encyclopedia that everyone can edit. Even if from Portugal, and a native speaker/writer of Portuguese. That issue aside, I think you, and Blueboar, are mostly correct over the rest. - Nabla ( talk) 00:05, 22 February 2013 (UTC)
Because of examples like the incessant editwar at History of physics as reported at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Dates and numbers#Another BC vs BCE edit war, where the MoS's wishy-washiness at Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Dates and numbers#Era style is leading to protracted editwarring, and cases like Celtiberians where use of "BC" lead to confusing absurdity (the Celtiberian culture entirely pre-dated Christianity, so this religion and the dating nomenclature used by it is completely irrelevant to the WP article in question, as they are in articles on various world religions, and, well, anything not involving Christianity as an important aspect of the topic), I propose that this section needs to be reworded to provide clearer advice.
I propose that its first three lines be changed from:
- By default, years are numbered according to the Western Dionysian era (also referred to as the Common Era).
- AD and BC are the traditional ways of referring to these eras. CE and BCE are common in some scholarly and religious writing. Either convention may be appropriate.
- Do not change the established era style in an article unless there are reasons specific to its content. Seek consensus on the talk page before making the change. Open the discussion under a subhead that uses the word "era". Briefly state why the style is inappropriate for the article in question. A personal or categorical preference for one era style over the other is not justification for making a change.
to
- By default, years are numbered according to the Western Dionysian Era, also referred to as the Common Era.
- While AD and BC are traditional ways of referring to dates within and before this era, respectively, CE and BCE have become increasingly common in scholarly works, non-Christian religious writing, and other material in which Christianity is not a central topic. Either convention may be appropriate in a particular article.
- Do not change the established era style in an article unless there are reasons specific to its content. The most common reason is whether or not Christianity has strong ties to the article topic. As with any potentially controversial change, it is recommended that editors seek consensus on the talk page before making the change. Open the discussion under a subheading that uses the word "era". Briefly state why the current style is inappropriate for the article in question. A personal preference for one era style over the other, or a categorical preference that is not tied to the content of the article or the nature of its subject, is not justification for making a change.
(Aside from making the obvious change to advise against BC/AD in articles unconnected to Christianity and BCE/CE in articles that are clearly connected to Christianity, it fixes a few minor wording problems as well.)
I would like to invite community commentary on this idea, the goal of which is to reduce confusion, prevent editwars, and head off attempts by fans of one style or the other to effectively WP:OWN dating topics by being the first major contributors to go around sticking dates in innumerable stub articles. There are usually good reasons to use one style or the other, and reducing this to a first major contributor "land grab" is not helpful to the project. Please note that the wording does not suggest that BE/BCE is the default, it simply minimizes the extant strong implication that AD/BC is the default, a position that has never reached consensus at all and has always met with stiff opposition, on many bases, from conflict with the standard used in almost all modern scientific and many if not most academic non-science reliable sources, to blatant religious offensiveness to non-Christians, an obvious WP:NPOV and WP:BIAS problem. The change would not give blanket license to force, say, History of Spain or Roman Britain to BCE/CE dating, even if it turned out that most modern, in-print publications were doing so (which is doubtful outside of archaeology, but that's not the point), since Christianity is an important aspect of both of those topics. It would, however, prevent early editors from forever saddling topics like History of China, Machu Picchu, Julius Caesar, etc., with AD/BC dates inappropriately simply because they got there first. The proposed change is intended to be non-trivial but balanced, and respectful of the valid reasons for using either style appropriately. The change is inspired by the spirit of WP:ENGVAR, which is centered on a national variety of English having "strong ties" to the article subject.
Note that this draft language and is expected to be tweaked as the discussion progresses. Please do not reflexively toss up an "Oppose" !vote because of a disagreement with a word or two (nor knee-jerk support because you like part of it but are having to forcey ourself to ignore part of it that could be problematic). A poll/survey is not even needed at this stage, but a consensus discussion on how best to address the obvious and sometimes silly problems the current wording is calling and the more serious protracted editwars resulting from them. Please do not post counter-proposals, but work toward consensus on a single proposal everyone can agree to.
—
SMcCandlish
Talk⇒ ɖ⊝כ⊙þ
Contrib.
14:16, 5 February 2013 (UTC)
−
Academic preciousness and distaste for Christianity is no reason for us to put our thumbs on the culture's scales (howevermuch we, as presumably active and involved editors, may inordinately represent that establishment). The pages that have this style argument will have them, consensus will develop, and that will be much better all around than attempts at antireligiously-based prescriptivism. — LlywelynII 20:08, 6 February 2013 (UTC)(a) BC/AD is massively more common (and simply more appropriate) when referencing the Dionysian era;
(b) BCE/CE is pointy, distracting, and should be generally discounted;
(c) except when a non-Christian religious tradition has a strong(er) tie to the article topic.
Oppose because none of it makes any sense to me and i'm only here because RFC Bot sent me an invitation however the majority of people here believe it will not be beneficial and these are the people who have an idea of it so who am i to question those who understand? MIVP - (Can I Help?) (Maybe a bit of tea for thought?) 16:38, 19 February 2013 (UTC)
This wording is longer and would lead to more arguments. Also, much like yards v Metres or ENGVAR there is a very good reason to stick to first mover advantage, not only is it simple but it keeps it consistent with those systems. What we really should do is make this a user option and allow people to choose whether Wikipedia displays to them as AD/BC or CE/BCE. That would be simpler and fundamentalists on both sides would have won. Ideally we'd also do this with ENGVAR and measurements. Mediawiki has the technology for this - it is used on the Chinese WP to display one of three different character sets. We should deploy that on EN wiki. Ϣere SpielChequers 00:16, 21 February 2013 (UTC)
*Good grief... What on Earth are we to do when we inevitably run out of inflammatory inconsequentialities to belabour each other with, instead of getting some work done? I prefer the CE and BCE convention myself, simply because it is accurately descriptive and one of the operative terms in the description happens to be "Common". However, I grew up using the terms BC and AD, so I am comfortable with them. I strongly oppose using any other standard dating convention in English in discussing topics where they are not specifically relevant; for instance BP is appropriate in palaeontology and certain branches of remote archaeology, and Muslim and Judaic calendars dates might well prove convenient in certain historical and religious contexts, but to predicate the choice of convention on sentiment where everybody's sentimental attachment is someone else's sentimental abhorrence is futile, on some people's ignorance when they cannote even look up BCE or CE on WP when they actually are in WP, and on religious topics where the topics are not at issue, and in fact completely irrelevant, does no one's faith any favours. In case anyone's literacy does extend to such competence, we could blue-link BCE and CE to accommodate them; if it does not extend blue links, we don't need to accommodate them. Personally I am not much bothered with the wording as it stands, and quite happy with the proposed change, but I think I must go along with Peter coxhead, simply in the light of the nauseating outpouring of venom foregoing (and no doubt to follow). JonRichfield ( talk) 08:52, 22 February 2013 (UTC)
Hello, all. Another editor and I would like some clarification on WP:MOSIM. I've been suggesting at Talk:Ludwig Adolph Timotheus Radlkofer#Image placement that since the MOS states we must begin each article with a right-aligned image, it has always been my impression that this is true even in cases where the lead image is of a person where facing away from the text when placed on the right, even though another provision of MOSIM is that it is often preferable to place face images so that they look into the text. The other editor in the discussion suggests that neither provision trumps the other and he can place the lead image on the left since it looks into the text that way. If consensus is for the former position, even though it may be widely understood, perhaps adding "unless it is the lead image or in an infobox" clause to the face image point to MOSIM would be a good measure. Cheers, Rkitko ( talk) 14:17, 18 February 2013 (UTC)
A quietly perennial topic has popped back up at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Wales#Lead sentences in Welsh history bios, but has nothing in particular to do with Welsh, and trying to set a WP:LOCALCONSENSUS there will be, as usual in such cases, pointless or worse. In broadened terms, the issue is whether genuinely patronymic names should be glossed (translated) into English at some point in the article on the topic (I have to assert that the answer is an obvious "yes"), and if so, how. (The discussion at that project has already moved past "whether" into "how".) There are multiple proposals for how to do this, none of them mutually exclusive:
'''X patronymic Y''' (X son of Y)
. Exact appearance will necessarily vary on a case-by-case basis, as determined by pre-existing style rules (and we probably needn't give all of these kinds of examples, though doing so might not hurt):
'''X patronymic Y''' (X son of Y)
'''X patronymic Y''' ('''X son of Y''')
X patronymic Y (X son of Y)
'''X son of Y''' ([[FOO language|FOOian]]: ''X patronymic Y'')
'''X son of Y''' ([[FOO language|FOOian]]: '''''X patronymic Y''''')
{{FOOname|X|Y}}
,
hatnote at the top of the aritcle, which would render something like: This is a
FOO name. It means "X son of Y". (An existing example is the {{
Welsh name}}
template, which handles "daughter of" cases as well.)X patronymic Y<!--X son of Y-->
{{Infobox:FOO-bio}}
(if such an
infobox template exists for that language/culture); it could be done simply by adding a parenthetical to the |name=
or by adding a new parameter.The lead sentence form X patronymic Y (English: "X son of Y") has also been proposed, but does not agree with how we handle translation into English generally.
— SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ɖ⊝כ⊙þ Contrib. 22:33, 20 February 2013 (UTC) Updated: 23:27, 20 February 2013 (UTC)
Myself, I would prefer the default to be X son of Y (FOO: X patronymic Y) for explanatory and stylistic reasons. You seemed to support that at the Welsh discussion, but I understand people feel it might be confusing or run afoul of Common Name issues. In the absence of that, I would prefer X patronymic Y ("X son of Y") without the need to specify that the patently English text is, in fact, English.
Any thoughts on smart/dumb quotes? — LlywelynII 22:58, 20 February 2013 (UTC)
With regards to this and this, and in general, isn't this whole "shorter than five letters" notion leading to inconsistent, illogical results? And where does it come from? (like, what's the reference work for [English-language and otherwise] title capitalization out there?)
I mean, as is, when in mid-title, it produces things like this:
"than", "from", "till", "Until" – ... from ... Until... looks weird, does it not?
To conform to this, From Dusk Till Dawn had [rightly] just been changed to From Dusk till Dawn – problem is, it seems to be spelled From Dusk Till Dawn virtually everywhere else (a similar case would be Stranger than Fiction vs. IMDb's Stranger Than Fiction);
also, it's still Wait Until Dark, although "until" is just a one-letter-longer variant form of "till".
But if "till" were changed to "Till", we'd still have the lowercase "from", making for constructions like ... from ... Until... and ... from ... Till....
Changing "Until" to lowercase in turn would then be at variance with a whole host of other five-letters-or-longer prepositions and conjunctions.
Seriously, what the heck? I'm confused out of my mind... – ὁ οἶστρος ( talk) 15:15, 29 November 2012 (UTC)
Capitalize the main words in a title and the first and last word, but do not capitalize a, the, to, or prepositions and conjunctions of fewer than five letters when they occur in the middle of the title.
The classic system is to capitalize the initial letters of the first and last words of a title or subtitle, as well as all major (or "significant") words. Do not capitalize articles (a, an, the), conjunctions (and, but, if) or short prepositions (at, in, on, of) unless they begin the title.
The use of capital, or uppercase, letters is determined by custom. They are used to call attention to certain words, such as proper nouns and the first word of a sentence.
Capitalize the initial letters of the first and last words of the title of a book, an article, a play, or a film, as well as all major words in the title. Do not capitalize articles (a, an, the) or coordinating conjunctions (and, but, for, or, nor, yet, so), unless they bigin or end the title (The Lives of a Cell). Capitalize propositions within titles only when they contain more than four letters (Between, Within, Until, After), unless you are following a style that recommends otherwise.
What I find interesting about all these style guides is that the question isn't really what to do with four character prepositions, it's what to do with five-and-longer ones. I think all of them would have "over" be in lower case, but some of them simply say that prepositions should be in lower case, and give no different rule for longer ones.— Kww( talk) 15:13, 11 December 2012 (UTC)
While I personally think we should just go the IMDb way (as ungainly as some of the titles there look) and style everything according to the guidelines used there, to take JHunterJ up on his proposal, how about modifying WP:NCCAPS to accommodate for these spelling versions?:
[proposed by ὁ οἶστρος:]
[proposed by JHunterJ:]
Would be a compromise / hybrid of "both worlds": even more lowercasing but at the same time allowing for some exceptions to avoid counter-intuitive "butt-ugliness". – ὁ οἶστρος ( talk) 12:49, 12 December 2012 (UTC)
Commment. This discussion seems to be quite film-centric, and maybe isn't taking fully into account the requirements of other projects that have prominent usage of composition titles, but surely we should be discussing any changes in terms of published style guides, and which we should take our lead from, rather than in terms of what other websites do. -- Rob Sinden ( talk) 13:49, 19 December 2012 (UTC)
To respond to the original post, I have no idea where the "five letter" so-called rule came from, and disagree with it (and wonder who added it, with what supposed consensus), but it's a moot point. We don't change the titles of published works, last I looked, if they are consistently done a particular way. Now, if movie posters for From Dusk Till Dawn sometimes spelled it "till", we'd have a case for applying MOS's lower-casing rule, but otherwise we don't. — SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ɖ∘¿¤þ Contrib. 02:25, 24 December 2012 (UTC)
SMcCandlish, as shown at the very beginning of this section, Wikipedians, such as many of those assessing RMs, for example, clearly do not follow what you put forward, but instead point out that the MoS was "quite clear about this" – and why should they not?, as the MoS is clear on that point, only that it advocates, well, [at the very least] questionable rules for that point to begin with, in my opinion. (and, yeah, I won't contest the fine by the style police for the æsthetically challenged overuse in close succession of words deriving from the same root, and will instead only point at myself)
(Incidentally, I don't see a need for opening the can of worms – as I don't think it's as clear-cut as some seem convinced – of where the line between style and substance, the formal and the material, is to be drawn.)
There seems to be agreement (among the few participants in this discussion) that the current title capitalization rules are insufficient / subpar. So, where to go from here? What formal steps are there to be taken? While I don't know my way around the procedural parts of Wikipedia, what I can do is repeat, sum up and juxtapose the three options currently on the discoursive table, so that it can be presented in a bit less unwieldy and more neatly fashion for further consideration (although it's certainly not meant to replace the much more detailed and comprehensive debate proper).
But first, let me object to the claim that what's proposed here were film-centric approaches. I dont see that at all. To me – and I've yet to hear a cogent argument contradicting this –, work titles are work titles are work titles (yeah, we style TV series titles differently from episode titles, but you get the gist), and the rules suggested can be applied (and are widely applied) unreservedly to songs, sheet music, books, articles, video games, what have you (again, see the [short, unrepresentative and unsystematic] laundry list of publications I give a few posts above this one) – and for all, there are some quirky specimens that elude easy classification, that therefore can be controversial and for which there has to be made a case-by-case decision on how to represent them. (Like, is it "Se7en" or "Seven"?) Sure, I mostly (but not exclusively, as correctly indicated by JHunterJ) use[d] film titles for illustrative purposes here, but I might just as well have chosen song or poem or declaration or manifesto titles.
Oh, and, please, no more accusations of me wanting "whimsical" solutions:
For one, adding to JHunterJ's voice, it's been declared here numerous times before that the MoS is its very own, independent entity that draws non-exclusive inspiration heavily from a multitude of renowned – and sometimes conflicting – normative guides without following, adopting and adapting everything from all or any particular one of them (whether that's right / appropriate / wise or not is another matter to be examined separately).
Apart from that, it's obvious to anyone who really read what I wrote that I amply, over and over, many, many [many, many, ...] times repeatedly expressly declared that I would like to see authoritative sources on the matter and certainly wouldn't mind the MoS to be grounded on such.
There has been some chiming in, but I'm still mostly left in the dark as to what (singular or plural) both Wikipedia's MoS and the breadth of respected publications I enumerated base their capitalization on – and since the former goes against virtually all of the latter (and at times even against the BFI, the sole "contrarian" in the mix), if anything, it seems to me, it's the current practice at Wikipedia that might be termed "whimsical"...
IMDb serves as just one widely recognized and vastly influential (irrespective of what one personally might think of them) exponent that uses a way of displaying titles that (assuming – and conceivably incorrectly so – that it's everywhere identical down to the minutiæ) seems to be the predominant one the world over (it also makes sense to look at what IMDb does in light of the fact that they surely must obsess over spelling, as it's a, no, the vital part of their business, on which hinges quite everything for them).
Anyway, here are the three main types of capitalization rules weighed so far (NB: what follows is not worded in a manner fit for inclusion into the MoS; it's still about gauging the what? before taking on the how?, though shots at drafting something usable are naturally always welcome):
Or, by way of examples:
Still open (well, for the person adding it, anyway):
[added by
ὁ οἶστρος:]
[add what else comes to mind] – ὁ οἶστρος ( talk) 18:40, 8 January 2013 (UTC)
Some quick thoughts. Scjessey, thanks for the link. However, according to your source, "[...], The Associated Press would have you capitalize prepositions and conjunctions if they are four or more letters long." [bolding by me] – or in other words, the AP propagates (again, according to dailywritingtips.com) a "shorter than four letters rule" (which is not what WP:MoS currently prescribes), resulting in ... Into ..., ... Over ... and ... Upon ... (just like as seen at IMDb etc.), but also in ... From ... and ... With ... (unlike what's at IMDb etc.); but then again, maybe those rules are more intricate and dailywritingtips.com simply conveys them wrongly. This wouldn't surprise me, as they also feature this:
"Sentence case, or down style, is one method, preferred by many print and online publications and recommended by the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association. The only two rules are the two rules mentioned above: Capitalize the first word and all proper nouns. Everything else is in lowercase. For example: Why it’s never too late to learn grammar (all words lowercased except “Why”—first word in title)"
This seems to be misrepresenting APA in general or is at the very least confusing, as it doesn't mention APA's approach to titles. While I couldn't find much of anything useful concerning major style guides with unrestricted access online, I did stumble upon this (see p. 48). Recommending for titles what they call "Headline-Style Capitalization", the APA actually seems to say (what follows is out of the 2011 edition of the Pocket Guide to APA Style, an inofficial sorta "Reader's Digest" version of the real thing),
"[...]; capitalize all other words except articles, to (as part of an infinitive phrase), and conjunctions or prepositions of three or fewer letters." [again, bolding by me]
This again gives [among others] the weird ... From ... and ... With ... constructs (again, if represented accurately by that source).
Robsinden wrote, "we should not be arbitrarily inventing our own style guide". To basically repeat what I wrote several times before: If we already are following an amalgamation of several style guides (it does not seem to be "CMoS + AP", though), I don't see any methodological difference between that and my "proposition 3" (whether I would actually prefer that to what IMDb and others do, I'm not yet sure myself). – ὁ οἶστρος ( talk) 18:46, 14 January 2013 (UTC)
And just to demonstrate the point [6]. -- MASEM ( t) 05:58, 30 January 2013 (UTC)
(
ὁ οἶστρος (
talk)
13:23, 30 January 2013 (UTC):)
To unify two discussions basically dealing with the same issues, the following was transferred here from
its original location at the
talk page for MoS:CAPS:
4-letter prepositions in composition titles
WP:CT is clear that only prepositions of five letters or more should have their first letter capitalized, but I've never seen an uncapitalized four-letter preposition in a title that didn't look wrong. The aforementioned Star Trek RM touches on this; it's definitely against CT, but it just looks sloppy and doesn't appear that way in most sources. I'm not the type to prefer source styling over MOS styling, though, so would anyone be amenable to expanding CT to capitalize four-letter prepositions? And don't tell me how much work that would entail—just whether it would be right or wrong, please. -- BDD ( talk) 17:33, 11 December 2012 (UTC)
- It would suffer from the same problem with different words, such as "with" and "from" ( View from the Top, It Came from Beneath the Sea, The Man with the Golden Gun, etc.) I think an explicit list is in order if the rule is to be changed, capitalizing some four-letter prepositions and leaving others uncapitalized. Maybe even capitalize some three-letter prepositions, as we already do in 33⅓ Revolutions Per Monkee. -- JHunterJ ( talk) 12:40, 12 December 2012 (UTC)
- Glad to see someone's talking about this. We've digressed on the "Into" argument regarding Star Trek, and we've opened a whole new can of worms. If, as some sources are suggesting, "into" becomes part of a phrasal verb, should it be capitalised according to the MOS? As far as we can see, it should. If that is the case, there are many articles (see a massive list of examples in the Star Trek discussion, some of which qualify) that may also need the "into" capitalised. Might it be wise for us to discuss the existence of phrasal verbs, and how this affects capitalisation? drewmunn ( talk) 12:56, 18 December 2012 (UTC)
- Can you provide an example of a phrasal verb using "into"? (The Star Trek problem, IMO, is not one of phrasal-verbness, but instead stems from the use of a subtitle "Into Darkness" without the normal colon or dash or other indication; clever marketing, perhaps, but lousy style; as a sentence, "Star trek into darkness" doesn't work so well, so "Star Trek into Darkness" doesn't either, but neither does "Star Trek Into Darkness"; I'd go with "Star Trek: Into Darkness", and ignore their marketing style. But I realize that perspective is probably just one of many in that discussion.) -- JHunterJ ( talk) 14:08, 18 December 2012 (UTC)
- Crash into Me and I'm into Something Good are two examples of the word being used as particles of the verb and should be capitalized, but aren't. There are many more. I also found Run Into the Light as one example of "into" being capitalized in a title, yet I'm not really sure it should be since it does look like it's being used as a preposition there. -- DocNox ( talk) 23:55, 18 December 2012 (UTC)
- Whay should "Crash into Me" be capitalised? I don't think this is a phrasal verb. The verb is "to crash", "into" is just the preposition. Not sure about "I'm into Something Good" though - maybe in this context "to be into" is a phrasal verb. "Run into the Light" shouldn't be capitalised though, unless it is about a chance encounter with the light! -- Rob Sinden ( talk) 09:00, 19 December 2012 (UTC)
- ( edit conflict) Be careful as to what is a phrasal verb and what isn't. "Trek into" wouldn't be a phrasal verb. In this example, "trek" is the verb, and "into" the preposition. However, "run into", as in accidentally meet some one, would be a phrasal verb, and in this example "into" should be capitalised in a composition title. However if you "ran into" a shop to get something, this is not a phrasal verb. -- Rob Sinden ( talk) 14:10, 18 December 2012 (UTC)
- As far as a general phrasal verb goes, "trek into" isn't one. I'm not talking about specifically Star Trek - that's a more complicated problem. -- Rob Sinden ( talk) 09:00, 19 December 2012 (UTC)
- Having read what you've put forward so far, it's straightened stuff out for me a little more. I agree now that "trek into" in it's pure form probably can't be a phrasal verb; as you say, it doesn't really have extra meaning when combined. "Star Trek Into", however, probably could be, if you take it to mean the franchise gets dark. However, as you said, that complex and not really for this discussion. I know it's simplistic and probably too broad, but as suggested earlier by BDD, could we expand CT to cover "Into"? As suggested by JHunterJ, I don't think all 4-letter prepositions need CT, but some, specifically "into" could probably do with it. It would deal with all cases without the argument on a case-by-case basis. drewmunn ( talk) 09:11, 19 December 2012 (UTC)
- But what would be the justification for tmaking a special exception for "into"? Surely it should follow the same rules as every other preposition. -- Rob Sinden ( talk) 09:15, 19 December 2012 (UTC)
- Other than avoiding arguments such as the Star Trek one, I have nothing. drewmunn ( talk) 09:17, 19 December 2012 (UTC)
- The suggestion at WT:MOS#WP:NCCAPS → "shorter than five letters" rule is to abandon the letter-counting approach to preposition capitalization and instead identify which prepositions get capitalized and which don't. It wouldn't be a "special exception" for any of them. -- JHunterJ ( talk) 13:30, 19 December 2012 (UTC)
- I wasn't aware of that discussion, but I'm against the proposed changes! -- Rob Sinden ( talk) 13:42, 19 December 2012 (UTC)
- If it is an established system of usage of the English language, then it's fine, but editors seem to be cobbling together rules based on examples given on other websites, rather than respecting long established guidelines of usage. We should be discussing which guideline to follow in these cases, not make up our own. -- Rob Sinden ( talk) 14:05, 19 December 2012 (UTC)
I remember some rule from somewhere (sorry, that's not helpful to anyone), that prepositions with more than one syllable should be capitalized. Thus, "from" and "with" (examples given above) are both one syllable long, while "into" (the other example from above), "wherefore" (although, this exceeds WP's 5-letter rule) are two syllables and should be capitalized. Would this be helpful in this debate, and would it be a helpful rule in Wikipedia MOS? The word "into" is unusual for being two syllables rather than one for its letter length. Also, does anyone know where this rule comes from? — al-Shimoni ( talk) 02:27, 27 January 2013 (UTC)
- A follow-up on my last (and perhaps my last comment and this should be moved to a separate thread of its own). I was looking at other four-letter English prepositions. "Upon" is a four letter preposition, but two syllables, and I noticed that it is, so-far that I have observed, consistently capitalized in wiki articles (for example, the multiple "Once Upon a Time" articles). Four-letter two-syllable prepositions include: amid (a+mid), atop (a+top), into (a shortened compound preposition), onto (shortened compound preposition), over, unto (formed by analogy of "until", a shortened compound preposition), and upon (a shortened compound preposition). The reason I point out the shortened compound prepositions is that WP asks to capitalize the first word of compound prepositions (regardless of length). That they are shortened forms, however, makes that WP rule no longer applicable (at least, as currently written). But, it seems that since 1) all the two-syllable four-letter prepositions (except over) appear to come from compounds, and 2) their two-syllable nature seems to make them want to be capitalized (and there seems to be a rule somewhere that says one should capitalize such — see previous comment by me), then a rule could easily and reasonably be created to say they should be capitalized. As a note, there are no three or shorter letter prepositions with more than one syllable.
- Proposal: Perhaps we should amend the sentence in the article which says "Prepositions that contain five letters or more (During, Through, About, Until, etc.)" to read as "Prepositions that contain five letters or more (During, Through, About, Until, etc.), or more than one syllable."
- Thoughts?
- — al-Shimoni ( talk) 03:17, 27 January 2013 (UTC)
- I like it – and I don't: there are problems. Would you mind if I copied this whole section (or parts of it) over to the ["older", longer] discussion at WT:MoS and replied to you there? That way, everything would be centrally in one place – and a place where probably more people stop by than here. – ὁ οἶστρος ( talk) 23:32, 28 January 2013 (UTC)
- I haven't had time to read this through thoroughly, but from your last comment, I think we're getting somewhere. I agree with your observation of compound prepositions, and I think it warrants a look into. As for your proposal, I think it covers the purpose well. It may need some streamlining, but in essence I think it's good. drewmunn ( talk) 12:30, 27 January 2013 (UTC)
I only just now noticed this section deals with the same issue I first brought up last November here. Everyone's input over there obviously welcome.(Crossed out because I realized the discussion I started is already mentioned and linked further up by JHunterJ. The invitation to head over to and join me at that WT:MoS section obviously still stands. Sorry for the redundancy.) – ὁ οἶστρος ( talk) 19:42, 27 January 2013 (UTC) ( ὁ οἶστρος ( talk) 22:57, 28 January 2013 (UTC))
- Is there an established style guideline that supports the theory that a two-syllable preposition is a compound preposition, or is this just synthesis? -- Rob Sinden ( talk) 09:13, 29 January 2013 (UTC)
- Except for "over", all the English 4 letter prepositions that I've seen have been shortened/contracted compounds. But being shortened, they are no longer two distinct words, thus the WP:MOS rule about a compound preposition may not apply. "Over" — from every source I have seen — originates as a single preposition (cognate to German "über"). The list of two-syllable four-letter prepositions is quite short (listed above). There are no two-syllable three-letter, 2-syll two-letter, nor (obviously) 2-syll single-letter prepositions. Capitalizing 5+ letter preps, or 2+ syllable preps would cover much of the words in dispute. — al-Shimoni ( talk) 06:35, 30 January 2013 (UTC)
- Again, would the contributors here mind if I copied this over to WT:MoS, so we'd have everything in one place? I and others could just comment on your points there and link to here to get the context, but this would obviously be very cumbersome. Since I'd copy, not cut, you still could continue debating here if that's what you prefer, but I don't know if my action would be considered impolite or seen as an attempt to hijack your thread. Thoughts? – ὁ οἶστρος ( talk) 09:32, 30 January 2013 (UTC)
al-Shimoni, your wording "Prepositions that contain five letters or more (During, Through, About, Until, etc.), or more than one syllable." would improve some titles (in my opinion), but also bring about renderings such as these:
Stranger than Fiction,
From Dusk till Dawn (while this spelling has grown on me personally, it's still at variance with widest and [semi-]official usage),
The Englishman Who Went up a Hill But Came down a Mountain or
33⅓ Revolutions per Monkee
(And what about like? Am I mistaken in my belief, that while it technically consists of two syllables, in practice – like, when employing poetic meters – it counts as one-syllable word? So how to treat it?)
Not to mention that your theory isn't style guide-sourced [yet] – and so far, neither are my [prep] props 2 and 3 (nor our MoS's current policy, for that matter).
I was mulling over and going through conceptions along the lines or "word-width" / "number of 'slim' characters", but I ran into trouble there as well – and, again, I couldn't find any authoritative guides propping up such gedankenexperiments.
Further, the crux with such "mechanistic" rules is that they don't account for "inner-language logic" / innate relationships between words (over–under, up–down, from–till/until etc.), therefore suffering themselves from a kind of "inconsistency".
While I personally don't like everything about it, I'm in the process of coming around to advocating the syle employed here (see the TOC there), above given as [prep] prop 2, also used by IMDb and seemingly the de-facto standard in professional-level publications the world over – obviously under the condition that we can establish its origin / trace it back to a suitable source. If we achieve that, then, in my opinion, this would represent the best of both worlds: it would be a systematic, sourced solution, and it would be reflective of widest common authoritative real-life usage. – ὁ οἶστρος ( talk) 13:33, 30 January 2013 (UTC)
Sorry if this has been discussed already, but this is a long section… The way I see it, we should follow the MOS unless it conflicts with real-world use. The MOS should list an explicit exception for if no or scarce reliable sources use the style dictated by the MOS, or if a non-standard style is overwhelmingly used. This includes which words are and are not capitalized. — Frungi ( talk) 17:49, 31 January 2013 (UTC)
Into, Onto, Upon, Off of are all compound adpositions. The fact that they are shortened (space removed) does not suddenly make them not-compound adpositions. Where do the rules state that compound adpositions without spaces are exempt from the "capitalize the first letter of the compound adposotion rule?" The first word in the compound preposition INTO is INTO. This is the most literal interpretation of the rule you can take. The rule did not state "take the first letter of the first word ""when the compound preposition is more than one word." People who believed this were interpreting the rule incorrectly. http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/594/02/ All compound adpositions should be capitalized, but especially Into and Onto in certain circumstances. Words like amid and until are trickier, and there needs to be more research. I'm not comfortable saying they are compound prepositions because a and un cannot be used as prepositions alone. To clarify why this is - [I Ran the Door] [I Ran in the Door] [I Ran to the Door] [I Ran Into the Door] Notice: [(I Ran in)(to the Door)] doesnt even really make sense. It means you ran up to a door and stopped next to it. [(I Ran into the Store)] and [(I Ran in the Store)] mean the same thing. This class of words are more important than standard prepositions. Into is part of the verb because INTO is what you did, not ran. You should be consulting experts and not laymen with manuals to derive your rules. If you don't understand WHY a rule works the way it works, you shouldn't be advocating it just because the manual says so. Anyone who was advocating Star Trek into Darkness, because a manual says so, needs to go back and learn the grammar behind how the rules are formed. This situation mirrors HG Wells Time Machine. The Eloy follow the war sirens but they have no idea why. Then they get slaughtered. In this case people are advocating following rules, but nobody knows why the rule exists. If you can't explain WHY the rule is the way it is, go back and research more. In short: Onto and Into should be capitalized in titles, regardless of other rules, but especially when the presence of to changes the meaning of the sentence. They involve motion and they are compound prepositions. All compound prepositions (even the ones with spaces removed) should be capitalized, but ESPECIALLY when removing to changes the meaning of the sentence or fragment. "Star Trek in Darkness" is not synonymous with "Star Trek Into Darkness", thus Into should be capitalized. It would be moronic to claim that "The Empire: Strikes Back" should be punctuated that way just because Empire is bigger on the poster. The same rule would apply to Run in the Park and Run Into the Park. But not Run in to the Store and Run in the Store. The MOS is wrong if it does not take these situations into account. Rules like how many letters a word has are inadequate, broken, and harmful to Wikipedia. Xkcdreader ( talk) 13:20, 3 February 2013 (UTC)
As there has been little progress here lately and – with regards to the present state of affairs – I've already said (sometimes more than once) most of what there was to be said on my part, and since the amount of time that I can dedicate to discussing this will be limited for the nonce (while keeping up what I mostly do at Wikipedia anyway: reading and some WikiGnoming), [save for some major new developments] there likely won't be many more postings from me on this going forward. I'll take WT:MoS off my watchlist, so if anyone'd like to address me over something, please do so via my talk page, as otherwise I won't be aware of it.
Now, I'm sure you couldn't care less whether I'm sticking around or not; the reason I'm writing this is because the majority of the admittedly few people commenting do seem to be unsatisfied with the status quo of our MoS's work title capitalization rules, the disagreement apparently being mainly not on the that [we change them], but on the how [we change them]. So I hereby express my hope that someone will pick up the cause and prevent this section from being auto-archived after seven days (maybe there's a tag to achieve that, but I wouldn't know what it's called, nor whether I'd be authorized to use it).
My own opinion on what to go with oscillated between what I ended up calling "[prep] prop 2" and "[prep] prop 3". Since then, I've come around to favoring [prep] prop 2 – not because I personally like every aspect of it, but because, to me, it appears to be most in tune with real-world use by far (for all kinds of work titles). For although following CMoS's advice certainly would make for the simplest and, in a way, most logical prescriptions (correction: that title actually belongs to the method that capitalizes all words in a title, à la "Across The Alley From The Alamo" – just as ugly as what CMoS does, but much more prevalent) (all prepositions, regardless of length or other criteria, are lower-cased), that's just not what's done by the brunt of the major authoritative publishers (of newspapers, magazines, [fiction and non-fiction] books, sheet music, press material etc. pp.) out there. I predict even more challenges to the validity and jurisdiction of our MoS if we were to replace the "shorter than five letters" rule with CMoS's "lower-case all prepositions". And, I mean, anecdotally, An Essay concerning Human Understanding anyone? That just doesn't correspond to actual usage. And I guess I needn't really mention that the whole Star Trek Into Débâcle (and that one link given was before the tidings of the xkcd comic strip hit that talk page) would not have happened, had [prep] prop 2 been in effect (and, pre-emptively, no, it wasn't merely about whether or not the second part can be seen as an implied subtitle – see this whole discussion for illustrative purposes; and does anybody really believe that if From Dusk Till Dawn was released today the backlash would be any different from what went down in the Star Trek situation?). I'm not saying [prep] prop 2 will never lead to problems, but the number of instances would be greatly reduced. Also, with the MoS's capitalization rules being more in harmony with reality, a large chunk of the currently constant "who trumps whom" (WP:AT ↔ WP:MoS and so forth) bickering could be dispensed with as well.
Granted, save for someone suddenly stepping forward (sadly hasn't happened so far), if we were to go down that road, we might well have to resign ourselves to the fact (if it is a fact) that there either, a), really is no good style guide which this seemingly widest-of-all way of capitalizing work titles is grounded on, or that, b), it does exist but could potentially remain elusive for a very long time, pending a find.
By a), I mean it's conceivable for [prep] prop 2 to have developed from a general "capitalize important words" into what is today the de-facto standard, really (this is pure speculation, obviously). If so, isn't there a case to be made for something that has become a sorta benchmark, a best practice (leading to often quasi-[semi-]official title styling), passed on as a tradition, even if probably mostly without the knowledge where it's originated from / what it's based on? I mean, it's here, does it really devaluate the result if its genesis is shrouded in darkness? Think of it as a customary usage argument, think of customary law in jurisprudence, where something can become "law" / can gain [quasi-]legal status by mere continued constant application, no matter the roots. And what's more important for a guide, reliably demonstrable usage or a halfway-decently sourced set of rules that no one uses outside Wikipedia? (and I ain't so sure the MoS as is is implicitly well sourced on every point in the first place, though it's hard to tell since hardly any actual references are given anywhere)
I would very much prefer the circumstances to be different and have both, wide practical usage and a solid theoretical foundation said wide usage is based on, but, alas, the latter seems unattainable for the time being.
However, since there is an abundance of reliable, published sources that use the style of [prep] prop 2, therefore indirectly confirming its existence (precisely by applying that style / showing it "in action"), I'm confident its inclusion would not constitute original research.
In short, I hereby would like to recommend the adoption of the principles stated in [prep] prop 2 (while naturally retaining grammatically justified and explicated constructional exceptions, such as capitalizing on etc. when part of a phrasal verb). – ὁ οἶστρος ( talk) 14:40, 13 February 2013 (UTC)
for ease of reference, in repetition of a passage further up, this is what [prep] prop 2 says:
save for their position at the beginning or end of a title, these English-language words must begin with a lower-case letter:
a, an, and, as, at, by, for, from, in, of, on, or, the, to, with
(see also the list with examples)
—added by Frungi ( talk) 19:44, 15 February 2013 (UTC) / ὁ οἶστρος ( talk) 09:13, 16 February 2013 (UTC)
Should there be no or not enough or not yet enough support for this approach to work title capitalization, I'd appreciate it if someone kept this debate alive and saw it through to its conclusion. – ὁ οἶστρος ( talk) 14:40, 13 February 2013 (UTC)