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See Category:Lists of members of learned societies. Some are capped, especially "Fellows of the Royal Society", which I had a little pushback on while fixing. I'm presuming that even though "Fellow" is not a "job title", the same considerations as we have in MOS:JOBTITLES would apply. Other points of view on this? Dicklyon ( talk) 23:03, 1 October 2019 (UTC)
{{reply to|Eyer}}
to your message to
let me know.)
22:41, 2 October 2019 (UTC)
there were three Williams present. "Purple Hearts" is a false analogy to which I have already commented (below). It is the title of an award (not a proper name). It is a false analogy because pluralising does not alter the phrase internally. On the otherhand, fellow of a society is an honorific. MOS:JOBTITLES applies to honorifics such as king or president. It is directly analogous. As to "a beatle", this would be an informal or incorrect construct (if not contrived - ie a false example). One would (more correctly of more formally) say:
He was one of the Beatles. It might be a moot point but it is still not directly analogous to the case in hand (ie a false analogy) and we have guidance which is much more directly analogous. This is what we have an house style for. Regards, Cinderella157 ( talk) 10:09, 17 October 2019 (UTC)
{{reply to|Eyer}}
to your message to
let me know.)
17:43, 3 October 2019 (UTC)I'm seeing a clear majority opinion that JOBTITLES applies to such honorary titles. Unless someone starts an RFC that looks like it might overturn that, I'll assume per the recent "List of presidents of..." RM discussion that the consensus is that these overcapitalizations are worth fixing. Dicklyon ( talk) 03:38, 4 October 2019 (UTC)
Lower case: Per AReaderOutThataway. JOBTITLES applies. There is a formal title but by pluralising, it is no longer the formal title. "Purple Heart" does not change construction in the same way as the matter under discussion. "List of people with award X", does not alter the construction of X in the same way as the matter under discussion. And frankly, a proper noun is not descriptive. An orthographic convention to capitalise (or not) does not create equivalence with "proper noun". A title which is descriptive is not a proper noun even though convention or style may nonetheless result in it being capitalised. Regards, Cinderella157 ( talk) 11:43, 14 October 2019 (UTC)
the broad consensus to respect MOS:CAPSpresumes that MOS:CAPS actually says to lowercase "Fellows", but the closest thing in it is the bit about military awards and decorations. As mentioned above, "Fellow of the Royal Society" is analogous to "Victoria Cross", which MOS:CAPS says to capitalize. XOR'easter ( talk) 01:00, 18 October 2019 (UTC)
To quote @ Markworthen: in this discussion, "In American English "Internet" has traditionally been capitalized. However, Merriam-Webster notes: "In U.S. publications, the capitalized form Internet continues to be more common than internet, although the lowercase form is rapidly gaining more widespread use. In British publications, internet is now the more common form." American Heritage Dictionary lists "internet, also Internet". I reviewed Manual of Style/Capital letters; searched within the Manual of Style for "internet"; and searched Help for "manual of style internet", but did not find any specific Wikipedia guidance. I am in favor of "internet". Perhaps we should propose including a line or two about the word in the MOS and recommend using "internet" for articles in American English. I suspect most articles in BE, AU, NZ, and other forms of English already use the lower-case version, although I did not investigate." -- [E.3] [chat2] [me] 14:26, 9 September 2019 (UTC)
If, well meaning and constructive editors are getting this wrong then the rules need to be simplified, that's clearYes, I am often confused when trying to use the same style on the page when there is no MOS guidance. I understand with regional varieties of English, but things like emdashes and endashes, etc, are confusing when creating collaborative articles to me. Lowercase internet seemed like an easy way to standardise, for MOS from my experience in writing a detailed technical article as a newbie. -- [E.3] [chat2] [me] 15:14, 15 September 2019 (UTC)
A different perspective in 2018 by Musetti and colleagues reappraised the internet in terms of its necessity and ubiquity in modern society, as a social environment, rather than a tool, thereby calling for the reformulation of the internet addiction model.The internet is becoming established as an online environment, in some experts opinion, and so therefore not a proper name. -- [E.3] [chat2] [me] 15:05, 18 September 2019 (UTC)
There are many other such subtle distinctions. E.g.: "East Bay Community Recovery Project is partially funded by the City of Alameda" (a legal entity and thus a proper name); but "I work in the city of Alameda" (a place, disambiguated from the county of the same name). No one lives in "the City of Alameda" (unless someone's squatting in a particular government office building, I suppose).
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AReaderOutThataway
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05:20, 3 October 2019 (UTC)
Need your opinions on how to apply the caps rules to music artist JPEGMAFIA. Should it remain a stylization with just the J capitalized or should the article be renamed to all caps? Note it is not an acronym Talk:Jpegmafia AngusWOOF ( bark • sniff) 15:47, 16 October 2019 (UTC)
Please see Talk:JPEGMafia#Instagram_objection_to_title and comment there on whether the artist's objection to be named such a title format should be taken into consideration. AngusWOOF ( bark • sniff) 21:30, 5 November 2019 (UTC)
Talk:Three-Man_Chess is currently holding a discussion regarding the capitalisation of the names of several
chess variants, i.e. should we write
Three-Man Chess or
three-man chess?. These games are non-copyrighted derivatives of
chess.
MOS:GAMECAPS states that sports, games, and other activities that are not trademarked or copyrighted are not capitalized (except where one contains a proper name or acronym, or begins a sentence)
which would seem to pretty definitively rule in favour of non-capitialized versions.
However in the discussion we have found that many of these games are commonly referred to in capitalised form (including throughout The Classified Encyclopaedia of Chess Variants. The guidance appears to mandate a style here that clashes with common usage.
Practically, it seems like chess variants, although normally within the public domain, are generally discussed in the same manner as proprietary games and it would be more natural to use the same grammar. A bright line based on trademark/copyright status does not seem fit for purpose, and this guideline should be relaxed.
Specifically I propose to add "generally" to: sports, games, and other activities that are not trademarked or copyrighted are generally not capitalized (except where one contains a proper name or acronym, or begins a sentence)
and add the following text at the end of the paragraph: However some names of non-trademarked/copyrighted games are nevertheless typically capitalized (e.g.
Hearts (card game)), and capitalization should follow the format most commonly used for each game.
--
LukeSurl
t
c
14:23, 30 October 2019 (UTC)
I oppose this approach. The observation "commonly referred to in capitalised form" is far short of our usual capitalization criteria. Almost any term important to some specialized community will be commonly capitalized within that community. That doesn't make it a proper name, and WP style is not to dress it up as a proper name unless there's good evidence, such as "consistent capitalization", to show that it is one. The idea that we let others "vote" on our style, as in "follow the format most commonly used for each game" is antithetical to having a house style. And why do you think hearts is "typically capitalized"? Book stats appear to disagree strongly. Dicklyon ( talk) 02:27, 31 October 2019 (UTC)
Let's not rehash this to death yet again. We all have better things to do with our lives. I paid zero attention to the RM after opening it. Now that it's closed, I'm neither surprised by the result (that kind of case being exactly why MOS:GAMECAPS exists) nor by the emotive and fallacious arguments offered in opposition, which relate strongly to this thread. The thinking goes "Well, all my chess books, and most stuff I can find online that talks about weird chess variants ..." [i.e., just more chess-specific writing] "... capitalizes them". This is the WP:Specialized style fallacy (SSF). The whole point of GAMECAPS and most of the other shortcutted sections of MOS:CAPS ( MOS:DOCTCAPS, etc.), and many other MoS subpages is counteracting SSFs. The cry in that RM (from two commenters) to "overturn" GAMECAPS to protect rampant over-capitalization in one tiny corner of the games-sports-and-other-activities sphere is a classic "my wikiproject is a magical fiefdom that makes up its own laws" WP:CONLEVEL policy failure, which is why it had no weight with the closer.
GAMECAPS was established with a well-advertised RfC, and even then was just a minor clarification on much longer-standing, broad-consensus material against over-capitalizing for emphasis/signification (especially on a field-by-field basis). It follows on much larger RfCs, including one of the most detailed ever (on unnecessary capitalization of the common names of species in one particular field), among many others over the last 18-or-so years.
No we don't need a different, new, weaker standard for games; there's nothing topically special about them. And adding "generally" in there will simply make it a non-guideline. No, we don't need to argue about whether trademarked or copyrighted games (i.e., publications/works) need to be capitalized; that's a "yes", and it's already covered by
MOS:TM and
MOS:TITLES in detail. No, we don't need to re-re-re-argue about what "proper name" means for Wikipedia article title purposes; we already know from 1,000 prior threads like this that "is a name" and "is important to me" and "is sometimes capitalized by people who care about it a lot" and "was always capitalized in my great-grandfather's day" and "is capitalized by the government [or some other 'authority']" != proper name in either
the linguistics or
the philosophy sense. There's nothing new here, just more rehash.
Consensus can change, but it doesn't when nothing else has, especially when the rationale for doing so boils down to
WP:IDONTLIKEIT,
WP:OTHERSTUFFEXISTS, and
special pleading fallacies.
—
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ 😼
10:39, 8 November 2019 (UTC)
The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
Request for comment as to whether "Internet" should be upper or lower case, and whether this is suitable for inclusion in WP:MOS/CAPS. Please see this previous discussion. Recognising that the "Internet" used to be, or still is a proper name, upper case Internet remains American English (with its usage decreasing in American English). In other national varieties of English, internet is much more common. In the relevant article, we are unable to find a source for it being a proper name. "Internet" doesn't fall into any of the capitalization categories discussed in MOS, and I think it warrants specific mention, as there are numerous examples I have run across, where it causes reverts or confusion. Numerous external style guides mention this specifically. -- [E.3] [chat2] [me] 11:58, 9 October 2019 (UTC)
only words and phrases that are consistently capitalized in a substantial majority of independent, reliable sources are capitalized in Wikipedia. The previous discussion indicates that it does not meet the criteria either specifically or generally nor as a variety of English. As this TP now tracks relevant caps discussions, I don't think that the result of this RfC needs to be integrated into the MOS. Regards, Cinderella157 ( talk) 22:16, 17 October 2019 (UTC)
consistently capitalized in a substantial majority of independent, reliable sources. A reliable source is defined by WP:RS - not by whether one thinks they got it right. Internet fails this criteria. It also fails a theory based arguement that it is a proper noun. Regards, Cinderella157 ( talk) 10:30, 22 October 2019 (UTC)
discussed to death for about two decades. · · · Peter Southwood (talk): 05:39, 16 October 2019 (UTC)
There is somewhere within WP a paragraph about this, which I have seen before but now cannot find, and which to my mind belongs on this page, because this is where people go for guidance about capitalisation. In Australia, it is common practice to capitalise Aboriginal and Indigenous (or their cultural or language group name) when talking about our First Nations people, and several style guides point to this: ABC Style Guide, Monash University and an Indigenous-run site, to name a few. A quick google gives me a Canadian legal guide - same thing. The US appears to be more complicated, as per the Native American name controversy, and I suppose most other colonised countries have discussions in other languages. Can we have something added to this page about this matter? Or a direction to another page where a guideline or discussion exists? It would be useful to have a shortcut to such a guideline to use when editing others' work. Laterthanyouthink ( talk) 02:22, 9 November 2019 (UTC)
As for [i|I]ndigenous, I'm skeptical that any uses of this (even in long form with something more specific, like "indigenous Manx people" or "indigenous South Africans") have become proper names through becoming effectively standardized as exonyms, though there's a slight tendency to over-capitalize "just in case" even in some news media with professional editors. WP should not do that, since sources do not do it with anything approaching consistency, unless there's some particular exception I haven't noticed (if there is, then do it for that exception, not generally). The closest I've run across is [i|I]ndigenous Australians as a blanket term for 'the Aboriginals plus the Torres Strait Islanders', but it's not always capitalized, and it is not a consistently used term ("native Australians", etc., also occur in RS, and it seems most common to name them both specifically instead of using a catch-all; our own article at Indigenous Australians says in its lead, "Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people is preferred by many; First Nations of Australia, First Peoples of Australia, and First Australians are also increasingly common terms"). Capitalized Indigenous Australians appears to be some .gov.au officialese, an artificial categorization created for administrative purposes, and it is thus a WP:Specialized style fallacy to insist on it at WP, except at Indigenous Australians itself, our article on the term/concept.
Aside: It seems unfortunate and verging on unencyclopedic for us to have so much historical but commingled/confused content in that article, when it really belongs separated out at
Aboriginal Australians and
Torres Strait Islanders, and related articles on the early history, European colonization, and modern demographics of .au, with
Indigenous Australians reduced to an article on the term/categorization, with just a
WP:SUMMARY of historical matters using {{
Main}}
and other cross-references to point to the bulk of the material in its more proper contexts. (But that's a content not a style matter, so it's a bit off-topic here.)
—
SMcCandlish
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¢ 😼
13:51, 14 January 2020 (UTC)
The capitalisation of Spanish wine appellations seems to be different on different pages. In the Template:Spanish wine regions the categories are Vino de calidad, Vino de Pago, Denominación de origen (DO), and Denominación de origen Calificada (DOCa), and in text they appear as 'Vino de Pago' or 'vino de pago'. On the page Denominación de origen they are 'denominación de origen protegida ('protected denomination of origin')' and 'denominación de origen calificada ('denomination of qualified origin')'. On the Spanish government site they are 'Denominación de Origen, Vino de la Tierra, Denominación de Origen Calificada, Vino de Calidad con indicación geográfica , Vino de Pago' in titles, and then lower case in the text, but Spanish follows different capitalisation than English. [1]
What capitalisation should be used?
Also, the Denominación de origen title is in italics: should the Vino de calidad and Vino de Pago etc also be in italics? Fpr155 ( talk) 12:02, 7 January 2020 (UTC)
References
At Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Capital letters/Archive 30#Expanded forms of abbreviations, it says:
It seems confusing that it says not to use FOREX (foreign exchange) and then immediately afterwards says it's OK to use BX (from "base exchange") if it seems necessary. Are we saying that it's not necessary specifically for FOREX for some reason, or is it about adding the word "from", or ...? —[ AlanM1( talk)]— 18:16, 16 January 2020 (UTC)
If it came to a choice between A) "Never even use the italics, because even 'base exchange' is obvious, our readers do not generally have brain damage, and we don't want anyone to wikilawyer about it", vs. B) "I love 'base exchange' style, so let's force it on everything, like 'National Basketball Association'", then count me in for option A.
—
SMcCandlish
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¢ 😼
01:31, 5 February 2020 (UTC)
How are we to understand the examples in this bullet point. There seems to be, at minimum, a word missing:
I thought it was trying to say that scuba and laser shouldn't be capitalized but ZIP Code and bank PIN were exceptions and should be. So I changed it to read:
Deor reverted this saying, "Change said that ZIP & PIN were wrong. That's not correct." I'm not sure I understand this either. ~ Kvng ( talk) 18:25, 13 January 2020 (UTC)
This n-gram would seem to indicate (aside from the total death of "Z.I.P. [c|C]ode") that if you combine sources that understand this is a proper name with an acronym in it (thus "ZIP Code") with those that know it's a proper name but either don't know ZIP is an acronym or have a house style (as many do) to write as words not as initialisms anything that is a "word acronym" not sounded out as letters (thus "Zip Code"), plus sources that realize it's an acronym but not that it's a proper name (thus "Zip code"), it's about the same number of total sources that seem to pretend to understand neither that it's a proper name nor that it contains an acronym (thus "zip code"). And in reality, it's probably more that the house style in question is just more anti-capitalization that WP is, and seeks to down-case everything its writers think they can get away with down-casing. Regardless, the kind of near-perfect consistency for "zip code" or even "Zip Code" is just not there (even after you factor in a bit of false-positive for "Zip Code" instances appearing in title-case headings when the same writer might do "zip code" in running prose). There might be enough doubt here to go with "ZIP code", on the basis that enough sources are dropping the capital C in both "ZIP code" and "zip code" cases, plus the fact that a specific instance of a ZIP code isn't a proper name; it could be seen as "a ZIP code" (a code in the text string sense) within the "ZIP Code" in the system sense. But if you just trawl through Google News and Google Books results, you'll see total chaos; all of these variants are frequent. Since there's nothing remotely like a real-world consensus that "zip" has been re-assimilated as a non-acronym, there's no case to be made for that spelling here, even there's maybe a weak one for "code", at least in some contexts.
PS: Linguistically, the cases are not similar at all: things like scuba, sonar, radar, and laser do not coincide with pre-existing words; the fact that ZIP does (and the word in any of its senses has no relation to ZIP codes) makes it especially difficult for it to transition into a word from an acronym. Similarly, all the attempts by certain news publishers [principally British, but The New York Times is also in on it] to rejigger AIDS (the HIV disease) as "Aids", out of their weird habit of writing things like "Nato", "Nasa" and "Unesco", have come to rather little avail, in large part because "aids" is already a verb with little in common with AIDS (a rather opposite relationship, really, since a frequently fatal autoimmune disease doesn't help/assist anyone :-).
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SMcCandlish
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16:18, 5 February 2020 (UTC)
The article Gerard 't Hooft includes sentences like
't Hooft is most famous for his contributions to the development of gauge theories in particle physics.
My first reaction was that this should be capitalised at the start of a sentence ('T Hooft is most famous...
), as would be done with any other lower-case particule like de or von. However, my changes were reverted by
User:TimothyRias. I now notice that on other articles like
's-Hertogenbosch, the first letter is not capitalised even at the start of a sentence. Is this correct? And if so, should
MOS:LCITEMS be amended to note this exception?
Opera hat (
talk)
15:53, 19 February 2020 (UTC)
The current Wikipedia policy is at a cross with the common policy of scientific literature and most hobbyist literature. Outside Wikipedia, common names of species are capitalized. This is to distinguish a species from a descriptive name. E.g. Little Owl is a particular species Athene noctua and little owl is any of several tens of species of small owls, or a chick of a large owl. Worse, the current Wikipedia policy puts competent people off contributing to Wikipedia, see e.g. the discussion: https://www.birdforum.net/showpost.php?p=3998544&postcount=292 and the following posts: https://www.birdforum.net/showthread.php?t=373802&page=12 As not to waste the effort, this policy can be allowed only in new edits. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 87.102.169.130 ( talk) 12:13, 11 May 2020 (UTC)
More to the core point, though, see MOS:CAPS rule no. 1: WP doesn't capitalize that which isn't almost invariably capitalized in independent reliable sources (which does not just mean specialized sources, but also includes dictionaries, newspapers, etc.). As we saw with birds, even scientific journals that are not ornithology-specific generally do not permit the capitalization of common names of bird species (even in an ornithology article), despite ornithology journals mostly (but not universally) preferring the practice. Next, there's no such thing as a WP rule (and MoS is a guideline, not a "policy") which only applies to new material. WP just doesn't do grandfather clauses. (The one time I can recall that someone – an admin and then-member of WP:ARBCOM, closing an RfC – tried to impose one, the community just flat-out ignored that, and applied the RfC result consistently regardless of topic, article age, or WP:GA/ WP:FA status, because that's just how it works here.) It should also be noted that the cleanup of the overcapitalization was labor-intensive and took several years (just as the putsch to forcibly capitalize all that stuff also took years and generated a never-ending torrent of WP:DRAMA). Changing "trivial" style matters without very good reason is a poor idea, and comes with serious editorial productivity and goodwill costs.
The anon is wrong in other ways, most obviously this: It simply isn't true as a general matter that "common names of species are capitalized", even in specialist literature. In most fields of biology, the exact opposite is true, and many of them have an explicit convention against such over-capitalization (including for mammals in particular). About the only specialist literature that fairly regularly does capitalize vernacular names are in ornithology, the insectology subfields that study flying insects (they picked up the habit from ornithology), herpetology (sometimes, and via the same vector), and botany in the UK in particular; in almost all other cases, lower case predominates even in specialized academic literature. The habit of fanciers capitalizing bird names more broadly is mostly unrelated, and was picked up from field guides, which have frequently use the technique of capitalizing (and often boldfacing or otherwise marking up) anything on which they have an entry, as a signal that it is something that has an entry. Consequently, hobbyists and fanciers and armchair experts of all sorts have a strong tendency to capitalize just about anything for which a field guide or similar "topical encyclopedia" work exists alongside a bunch of dedicated online forums (e.g. rocks and minerals, wild mammals, car parts, electronics components, martial arts techniques, dance moves, etc.). The fact that birdwatchers and professional ornithologists both like to capitalize bird common names is accidental convergence, and is a habit which non-specialized publications largely ignore.
See, e.g., n-grams for "a bald eagle" vs. "a Bald Eagle"
[3] – lower case overwhelmingly dominates, despite the results including ornithological and birdwatcher publications, and worse yet for the capitalization case, the ratio of capitalization has decreased by an order of magnitude since the 1980s. One of the most common bird species of Europe is the rock partridge, but this is so infrequently capitalized in books that it doesn't even rate
[4]. Another super-common one is the white stork, and lower-case results dominate
[5]. Similar again for passenger pigeon
[6] (once one of the most common birds in North America, now extinct, and about which a tremendous amount has been written and published, including a lot of academic material about its extinction). You only get opposite, pro-capitalization n-gram results with very obscure bird species (i.e., those about which non-ornithological literature is rare). Same goes for herpetology: try the world-record largest caudate, the Chinese giant salamander, so rarely capitalized in publication it doesn't rate
[7]. Similarly, winged insects
[8] just don't show up frequently capitalized in books. Same goes for British plants
[9]. The specialist-publication preferences have virtually no effect on general-audience publishing. We find the same is true with regard to all specialist-overcapitalized topics, from music and fiction genres to military terminology to gamer jargon to outdoors (hiking, climbing, biking, etc.) lingo. It's the same pattern of specialists capitalizing certain very-special-to-us terms in a "signifying" way (see
MOS:SIGCAPS), when communicating with other specialists, while the rest of the world ignores this as a poor writing habit. The old saw that there's an amiguity between "a little [i.e. any small] owl" and "the Little Owl" is, of course, resolved by actually writing well, e.g. "the
little owl (Athene noctua), a species endemic to Eurasia and North Africa". (
—
SMcCandlish
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08:26, 24 May 2020 (UTC)
It's actually interesting to read the birdforum.net thread [10] in which the BIRDCON canvassing was injected in 2014. Here's some great quotes from participants at that site – user Richard Klim: "I quite like the widespread use of leading capitals for English vernacular names within the 'birding' community. But I think it's unrealistic to expect this practice to be followed in more general or scientific literature." and "I still fail to understand why birders are so concerned about this. Capitalisation of vernacular names has become the norm in English-language birding literature, and will surely remain so. But it's unusual to capitalise species names in scientific or more general literature, and it's reasonable that Wikipedia should have a consistent policy for all biological classes rather than pandering to the whims of a particular hobby group. So what...?!" and "But however strongly you/we feel about it, I don't think that the capitalisation of vernacular species names is likely to be adopted in mainstream literature anytime soon...". User fugl: "Indeed, as I said, who cares what Wikipedia does? We have our conventions, they have theirs." User Mysticete: "I can say that as far as science publications go, I am unaware of any journal for mammals which capitalizes Mammal common names. This is in contrast with Birds, where the majority of journal do so. So I would say, yes...capitalization of birds common names is largely a phenomena of the ornithological journals[.] Having recently submitted a wave of papers with common names of pinnipeds, this has sometimes snuck through the editing and resulted in edits during peer review." Now contrast this with the agitators there: User Nutcracker: "Be interesting to see what happens now. I'd recommend that all those who prefer capitalised English names resign from wikipedia if they are not allowed to captialise names any more. ... I gave up editing wikipedia some years ago"; and user Michael Retter: "If you think official English bird names should be capitalized, please take just a moment to share your thoughts as to why at at this link [i.e., to the BIRDCON RfC] .... We who support this [pro-capitalization] convention are currently losing 3:1." The meatpuppetry attempt was detected and called out in the RfC, though it actually just completely failed to rouse the rabble with a warcry; users of birdforum.net were generally too reasonable to drink the "give me my typography or give me death" Kool-Aid.
Now check out the two newer links the anon provided. Here's some quotes from the first [11], and just the first page of it – user Paul Clapham: "Well, the IOC World Bird List says [details on their naming standards elided] ... but they don't rank as an 'authority'." (This debate has always been about the IOC names in particular.) User Jurek: "I really think that there should be at least one public, free database of birds of the world to give back to the community which gives free records and free support for conservation." And user gusasp in reply: "I know one – Wikipedia! All of us can contribute as of right now. If we work together, we'll have it up to date in no time. I'm actually surprised how little engagement there is to edit this wonderful resource. It's there, ready to use and to contribute to." More from user Jurek: "... it makes sense contributing. ... If you can do it on English Wikipedia it would be wonderful. Many bird articles look like abandoned, waiting to be filled with information." and "... just 1-2 birders with enough time could potentially make the bird section a very informative resource. ... I was very sceptical about Wikipedia initially. ...[but] people are posting even some good quality bird photos, so it might become an useful tool for birders." User Viator: "They have very explicit rules on this which mandate lower case [link to MOS:LIFE here]. This was debated quite some time ago from memory and irrespective of the birding community that is their position." User Taphrospilus: "I found many errors in Avibase [an independent ornithology wiki] e.g wrong or no references." The thread is at least 13 pages long, very little of it has anything to do with Wikipedia, and the majority of it is complaints about various other resources (Avibase, HBW, BirdLife Illustrated, the IOC lists, Birds of the World, etc.) and conflicts between them, and most especially concerns about over-reliance on common/vernacular names and treating any of them as "official". The second link provided by the anon [12] is simply one post from the same thread. It (by user DMW) claims, "I recall that a lot of Wikipedia's bird description editors left after an administrator unilaterally decided that all common names must be lower case". Except neither element of this legend is true. Two editors quit (and may well have returned by now; I have not checked), and the decision was made by the community – not some loose-cannon admin – after 10+ years of excessive debate about the matter in which (using birdforum.net as a meatpuppet recruitment venue repeatedly since at least 2008) the pro-caps side made their case as strong as it possibly could be made, yet by their own reckoning were outnumbered 3-to-1 on the matter. The RfC was even closed by an admin who said he'd prefer that it went the other direction – the diametric opposite of a supervote. Since that time, various things have become much clearer, most notably that the community has little patience left for WP:BATTLEGROUND antics over style trivia, that MOS:CAPS is not broken (in RM and other discussions every single day we routinely down-case that which is not consistently capitalized in independent RS), and IOC itself did not become the global authority it wanted to be and which many people 5 to 10 years ago predicted that it would. The case for capitalizing common names of species of birds or anything else is even weaker in 2020 than it was in 2014 when we had that RfC.
Meanwhile, the evidence before us is exactly the opposite of what the anon would like us to believe. The regulars at birdforum.net today are not only concerned about lack of a good, editable bird-specific information resource, they're talking about doing concerted work on our articles to help it be that resource. There simply is no thick knot of them agitating to engage in a capitalization war, nor agitating against Wikipedia generally (at least not since 2014 when a user at both that site and ours, and a likeminded former user of ours, tried to stir their pot in such a manner). PS: In the original 2014 thread, after the RfC had closed, someone (user AlexC) at birdforum.net thought the lower-casing move was impractical: "To adjust the copy of over 10,000 articles to make sure there's no capitalized names throughout is a near impossible task." Yet we actually got in done in a year or so, and without it being a concerted effort, just general
WP:GNOME activity (and in spite of hostile, tendentious counter-activity by a couple of birders). It actually took much longer to track down and undo the over-capitalization that the same pro-caps people had imposed on other organisms (after agreeing not to do that); I was finding improperly capitalized monkeys, bats, rodents, and other things as recently as 2018, when I think we finally got the last of them. The lesson being that if you permit some micro-topic its own "magically special" exemption, this leads over time to general stylistic chaos that is much harder to manage or undo. It creeps like an infection from topic to topic.
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SMcCandlish
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09:01, 24 May 2020 (UTC)
So according to WP:TOURDAB and following sections, editors in the area of pop music tours have been naming the tour articles consistently with title case, in conformity with that guideline. For example, Category:Led Zeppelin concert tours, Category:Pink Floyd concert tours, and Category:Pearl Jam concert tours, except for a stray parenthetical disambiguation, "Tour" is always capitalized. This seems counterintuitive to MOS:CAPS. Granted, some bands give their tours proper names, and in the case of a proper name, a tour may be given title case. But absent a proper name, when Wikipedia is just throwing something on an article title, it seems to me that "tour" or "world tour" should be lower case. Comments? Elizium23 ( talk) 17:52, 2 March 2020 (UTC)
I have a question about this bit:
Doctrines, philosophies, theologies, theories, movements, methods, processes, systems of thought and practice, and fields of study are not capitalized, unless the name derives from a proper name: lowercase republican refers to a system of political thought; uppercase Republican refers to a specific Republican party (each being a proper name).
I'm a bit confused by the example, since it seems to be saying that 'republican' and 'Republican' are proper names, but in fact 'republican' is an adjective, not a proper name. And 'Republican' can be either a common noun (as in 'Many Republicans voted at my polling place') or an adjective (as in 'That was a very Republican thing to say') depending on context. But it's not really a proper name ever, though 'Republican Party' is a proper name of a party. Can someone clarify what this is supposed to mean? Shinealittlelight ( talk) 17:35, 8 March 2020 (UTC)
(each being a proper name)is meant to refer to
uppercase Republican refers to a specific Republican partyonly, i.e., each of Republican Party (Liberia), Republican Party (Malawi), Republican Party (United States), etc..As you said, as an adjective, it can be either " republican ideology" (common, lower-case), while in "the Republican candidate for the 99th district of Ohio", it is proper and upper-case. Both noun examples could go either way, depending on the exact meaning, too. In the US, at least, common usage of the term would usually refer specifically to members of the party (and be cap'd). —[ AlanM1( talk)]— 21:26, 8 March 2020 (UTC)
But then it's not entirely clear why it should be "the Me Too movement", as in our article Me Too movement, rather than "the me too movement". It's not one specific organization, which argues against capitalizing, but on the other hand it's not as general as "environmentalist". Peter coxhead ( talk) 11:24, 9 March 2020 (UTC)
So, trying to define movements and the like in "proper name" terms in the guideline simply begs the question and turns the reasoning circular. E.g., trainspotters frequently argue at RMs related to transit/transport topics that "Foo Bar station" or "Aybeeseeville–Eckswyzeetown line" must have capitalized "station" and "line", because they "are" proper names, because signage has the words capitalized. (Meanwhile, the same signs actually capitalize every single word on them in many cases, even "of" and "the".) There is no end to the tortured reasoning that misc. editors will use to arrive at a "my pet topic must be a Proper Name" result. MoS rarely uses "proper name" [or "proper noun"], and generally does so only in contexts in which the meaning of the notion is not regularly bound up in disputes about the exact style question addressed by the line in which MoS is using the term "proper name". But in this case, the
fallacy of equivocation runs thick and hot in virtually any thread about whether this or that movement, school of thought, doctrine, philosophy, etc., should or should not be capitalized. "Proper name" will be taken to mean whatever someone wants it to mean so they can be
WP:WINNING. :-/ The still-practical way out of this is the status quo to default to lower case unless for a specific topic the sources overwhelmingly capitalize it.
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SMcCandlish
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09:18, 24 May 2020 (UTC)
This sentence on this section of the Manual of Style contradicts what I read on the specific section about music:"In English, capitalization is primarily needed for proper names, acronyms, and for the first letter of a sentence." See? It clearly says "the first letter of a sentence" but does NOT talk about "the last word of a sentence" as the section about music does. What is wrong with whoever wrote this? -- Fandelasketchup ( talk) 15:08, 24 May 2020 (UTC)
Do we have a guideline about whether and when to adopt the title-case capping of NRHP listings? Quite a few things are capped only because they are on the register; e.g. Laconia Passenger Station, Alton Bay Railroad Station. Dicklyon ( talk) 22:00, 16 May 2020 (UTC)
Hope this is the best Talk page for this.
This sprang out of the article title discussion on Talk:Four_Past_Midnight and is ref Titles of Works connected to printed works, esp novels, poems, and also plays, musical/opera libretti etc.
A writer's choice of grammar, spelling, capitalisation, and so on, is just as much protected by copright law under the Berne Convention as any other authorial choice.
The 'right to make reproductions' aspect of the convention prohibits alteration of those authorial choices. When we italicise the title of a novel, we are stating it as the actual title of the work, and therefore essentially reproducing the author's work, including their choices with regard to capital letters.
They have the right to make choices of how things appear on the page; and even when they don't particularly exercise that right, they still have it.
Publishers only impose their house or some graphic style if the author has agreed to that, even if by tacit acquiescence. That aspect is part of the negotiation with a publisher, and sometimes an author makes it clear that they have made a different creative choice for the work. For an example of this, see books such as House of Leaves, where the text is printed in many different directions on the pages, and in specific fonts.
Where there is a question about this, our policy really ought to be that we check to see if we can find the author's intention for the title before we apply any other case or style. Which might be a little more work, but seriously, Four past Midnight should never have happened in the first place. -- BessieMaelstrom ( talk) 22:15, 24 May 2020 (UTC)
Greetings to all,
A Request for comment has been initiated regarding RfC about whether to allow use of honorofic 'Allama' with the names or not?
Requesting your comments to formalize the relevant policy @ Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Islam-related articles
Thanks
Bookku ( talk) 17:53, 9 July 2020 (UTC)
Please see
regarding a contradiction between
and
96.244.220.178 ( talk) 03:57, 12 July 2020 (UTC)
Can someone please look into the recent edit history of Mountain State University? An unregistered editor is insisting that "The Academy" is a proper noun and refuses to discuss the issue in Talk so it would be helpful to have the opinion of another editor. Thanks! ElKevbo ( talk) 04:32, 19 June 2020 (UTC)
Multiple news outlets, including AP and NYT, have recently moved to capitalizing 'Black'. Does that mean we should discuss moving to that? —valereee ( talk) 22:31, 15 July 2020 (UTC)
An administrator has begun an edit war at Georgetown University, insisting that "college" in the article is a proper noun and thus should be capitalized. Can someone else please provide an opinion? Thanks! ElKevbo ( talk) 22:43, 29 May 2020 (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 25 | ← | Archive 28 | Archive 29 | Archive 30 | Archive 31 | Archive 32 | → | Archive 35 |
See Category:Lists of members of learned societies. Some are capped, especially "Fellows of the Royal Society", which I had a little pushback on while fixing. I'm presuming that even though "Fellow" is not a "job title", the same considerations as we have in MOS:JOBTITLES would apply. Other points of view on this? Dicklyon ( talk) 23:03, 1 October 2019 (UTC)
{{reply to|Eyer}}
to your message to
let me know.)
22:41, 2 October 2019 (UTC)
there were three Williams present. "Purple Hearts" is a false analogy to which I have already commented (below). It is the title of an award (not a proper name). It is a false analogy because pluralising does not alter the phrase internally. On the otherhand, fellow of a society is an honorific. MOS:JOBTITLES applies to honorifics such as king or president. It is directly analogous. As to "a beatle", this would be an informal or incorrect construct (if not contrived - ie a false example). One would (more correctly of more formally) say:
He was one of the Beatles. It might be a moot point but it is still not directly analogous to the case in hand (ie a false analogy) and we have guidance which is much more directly analogous. This is what we have an house style for. Regards, Cinderella157 ( talk) 10:09, 17 October 2019 (UTC)
{{reply to|Eyer}}
to your message to
let me know.)
17:43, 3 October 2019 (UTC)I'm seeing a clear majority opinion that JOBTITLES applies to such honorary titles. Unless someone starts an RFC that looks like it might overturn that, I'll assume per the recent "List of presidents of..." RM discussion that the consensus is that these overcapitalizations are worth fixing. Dicklyon ( talk) 03:38, 4 October 2019 (UTC)
Lower case: Per AReaderOutThataway. JOBTITLES applies. There is a formal title but by pluralising, it is no longer the formal title. "Purple Heart" does not change construction in the same way as the matter under discussion. "List of people with award X", does not alter the construction of X in the same way as the matter under discussion. And frankly, a proper noun is not descriptive. An orthographic convention to capitalise (or not) does not create equivalence with "proper noun". A title which is descriptive is not a proper noun even though convention or style may nonetheless result in it being capitalised. Regards, Cinderella157 ( talk) 11:43, 14 October 2019 (UTC)
the broad consensus to respect MOS:CAPSpresumes that MOS:CAPS actually says to lowercase "Fellows", but the closest thing in it is the bit about military awards and decorations. As mentioned above, "Fellow of the Royal Society" is analogous to "Victoria Cross", which MOS:CAPS says to capitalize. XOR'easter ( talk) 01:00, 18 October 2019 (UTC)
To quote @ Markworthen: in this discussion, "In American English "Internet" has traditionally been capitalized. However, Merriam-Webster notes: "In U.S. publications, the capitalized form Internet continues to be more common than internet, although the lowercase form is rapidly gaining more widespread use. In British publications, internet is now the more common form." American Heritage Dictionary lists "internet, also Internet". I reviewed Manual of Style/Capital letters; searched within the Manual of Style for "internet"; and searched Help for "manual of style internet", but did not find any specific Wikipedia guidance. I am in favor of "internet". Perhaps we should propose including a line or two about the word in the MOS and recommend using "internet" for articles in American English. I suspect most articles in BE, AU, NZ, and other forms of English already use the lower-case version, although I did not investigate." -- [E.3] [chat2] [me] 14:26, 9 September 2019 (UTC)
If, well meaning and constructive editors are getting this wrong then the rules need to be simplified, that's clearYes, I am often confused when trying to use the same style on the page when there is no MOS guidance. I understand with regional varieties of English, but things like emdashes and endashes, etc, are confusing when creating collaborative articles to me. Lowercase internet seemed like an easy way to standardise, for MOS from my experience in writing a detailed technical article as a newbie. -- [E.3] [chat2] [me] 15:14, 15 September 2019 (UTC)
A different perspective in 2018 by Musetti and colleagues reappraised the internet in terms of its necessity and ubiquity in modern society, as a social environment, rather than a tool, thereby calling for the reformulation of the internet addiction model.The internet is becoming established as an online environment, in some experts opinion, and so therefore not a proper name. -- [E.3] [chat2] [me] 15:05, 18 September 2019 (UTC)
There are many other such subtle distinctions. E.g.: "East Bay Community Recovery Project is partially funded by the City of Alameda" (a legal entity and thus a proper name); but "I work in the city of Alameda" (a place, disambiguated from the county of the same name). No one lives in "the City of Alameda" (unless someone's squatting in a particular government office building, I suppose).
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Need your opinions on how to apply the caps rules to music artist JPEGMAFIA. Should it remain a stylization with just the J capitalized or should the article be renamed to all caps? Note it is not an acronym Talk:Jpegmafia AngusWOOF ( bark • sniff) 15:47, 16 October 2019 (UTC)
Please see Talk:JPEGMafia#Instagram_objection_to_title and comment there on whether the artist's objection to be named such a title format should be taken into consideration. AngusWOOF ( bark • sniff) 21:30, 5 November 2019 (UTC)
Talk:Three-Man_Chess is currently holding a discussion regarding the capitalisation of the names of several
chess variants, i.e. should we write
Three-Man Chess or
three-man chess?. These games are non-copyrighted derivatives of
chess.
MOS:GAMECAPS states that sports, games, and other activities that are not trademarked or copyrighted are not capitalized (except where one contains a proper name or acronym, or begins a sentence)
which would seem to pretty definitively rule in favour of non-capitialized versions.
However in the discussion we have found that many of these games are commonly referred to in capitalised form (including throughout The Classified Encyclopaedia of Chess Variants. The guidance appears to mandate a style here that clashes with common usage.
Practically, it seems like chess variants, although normally within the public domain, are generally discussed in the same manner as proprietary games and it would be more natural to use the same grammar. A bright line based on trademark/copyright status does not seem fit for purpose, and this guideline should be relaxed.
Specifically I propose to add "generally" to: sports, games, and other activities that are not trademarked or copyrighted are generally not capitalized (except where one contains a proper name or acronym, or begins a sentence)
and add the following text at the end of the paragraph: However some names of non-trademarked/copyrighted games are nevertheless typically capitalized (e.g.
Hearts (card game)), and capitalization should follow the format most commonly used for each game.
--
LukeSurl
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c
14:23, 30 October 2019 (UTC)
I oppose this approach. The observation "commonly referred to in capitalised form" is far short of our usual capitalization criteria. Almost any term important to some specialized community will be commonly capitalized within that community. That doesn't make it a proper name, and WP style is not to dress it up as a proper name unless there's good evidence, such as "consistent capitalization", to show that it is one. The idea that we let others "vote" on our style, as in "follow the format most commonly used for each game" is antithetical to having a house style. And why do you think hearts is "typically capitalized"? Book stats appear to disagree strongly. Dicklyon ( talk) 02:27, 31 October 2019 (UTC)
Let's not rehash this to death yet again. We all have better things to do with our lives. I paid zero attention to the RM after opening it. Now that it's closed, I'm neither surprised by the result (that kind of case being exactly why MOS:GAMECAPS exists) nor by the emotive and fallacious arguments offered in opposition, which relate strongly to this thread. The thinking goes "Well, all my chess books, and most stuff I can find online that talks about weird chess variants ..." [i.e., just more chess-specific writing] "... capitalizes them". This is the WP:Specialized style fallacy (SSF). The whole point of GAMECAPS and most of the other shortcutted sections of MOS:CAPS ( MOS:DOCTCAPS, etc.), and many other MoS subpages is counteracting SSFs. The cry in that RM (from two commenters) to "overturn" GAMECAPS to protect rampant over-capitalization in one tiny corner of the games-sports-and-other-activities sphere is a classic "my wikiproject is a magical fiefdom that makes up its own laws" WP:CONLEVEL policy failure, which is why it had no weight with the closer.
GAMECAPS was established with a well-advertised RfC, and even then was just a minor clarification on much longer-standing, broad-consensus material against over-capitalizing for emphasis/signification (especially on a field-by-field basis). It follows on much larger RfCs, including one of the most detailed ever (on unnecessary capitalization of the common names of species in one particular field), among many others over the last 18-or-so years.
No we don't need a different, new, weaker standard for games; there's nothing topically special about them. And adding "generally" in there will simply make it a non-guideline. No, we don't need to argue about whether trademarked or copyrighted games (i.e., publications/works) need to be capitalized; that's a "yes", and it's already covered by
MOS:TM and
MOS:TITLES in detail. No, we don't need to re-re-re-argue about what "proper name" means for Wikipedia article title purposes; we already know from 1,000 prior threads like this that "is a name" and "is important to me" and "is sometimes capitalized by people who care about it a lot" and "was always capitalized in my great-grandfather's day" and "is capitalized by the government [or some other 'authority']" != proper name in either
the linguistics or
the philosophy sense. There's nothing new here, just more rehash.
Consensus can change, but it doesn't when nothing else has, especially when the rationale for doing so boils down to
WP:IDONTLIKEIT,
WP:OTHERSTUFFEXISTS, and
special pleading fallacies.
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SMcCandlish
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10:39, 8 November 2019 (UTC)
The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
Request for comment as to whether "Internet" should be upper or lower case, and whether this is suitable for inclusion in WP:MOS/CAPS. Please see this previous discussion. Recognising that the "Internet" used to be, or still is a proper name, upper case Internet remains American English (with its usage decreasing in American English). In other national varieties of English, internet is much more common. In the relevant article, we are unable to find a source for it being a proper name. "Internet" doesn't fall into any of the capitalization categories discussed in MOS, and I think it warrants specific mention, as there are numerous examples I have run across, where it causes reverts or confusion. Numerous external style guides mention this specifically. -- [E.3] [chat2] [me] 11:58, 9 October 2019 (UTC)
only words and phrases that are consistently capitalized in a substantial majority of independent, reliable sources are capitalized in Wikipedia. The previous discussion indicates that it does not meet the criteria either specifically or generally nor as a variety of English. As this TP now tracks relevant caps discussions, I don't think that the result of this RfC needs to be integrated into the MOS. Regards, Cinderella157 ( talk) 22:16, 17 October 2019 (UTC)
consistently capitalized in a substantial majority of independent, reliable sources. A reliable source is defined by WP:RS - not by whether one thinks they got it right. Internet fails this criteria. It also fails a theory based arguement that it is a proper noun. Regards, Cinderella157 ( talk) 10:30, 22 October 2019 (UTC)
discussed to death for about two decades. · · · Peter Southwood (talk): 05:39, 16 October 2019 (UTC)
There is somewhere within WP a paragraph about this, which I have seen before but now cannot find, and which to my mind belongs on this page, because this is where people go for guidance about capitalisation. In Australia, it is common practice to capitalise Aboriginal and Indigenous (or their cultural or language group name) when talking about our First Nations people, and several style guides point to this: ABC Style Guide, Monash University and an Indigenous-run site, to name a few. A quick google gives me a Canadian legal guide - same thing. The US appears to be more complicated, as per the Native American name controversy, and I suppose most other colonised countries have discussions in other languages. Can we have something added to this page about this matter? Or a direction to another page where a guideline or discussion exists? It would be useful to have a shortcut to such a guideline to use when editing others' work. Laterthanyouthink ( talk) 02:22, 9 November 2019 (UTC)
As for [i|I]ndigenous, I'm skeptical that any uses of this (even in long form with something more specific, like "indigenous Manx people" or "indigenous South Africans") have become proper names through becoming effectively standardized as exonyms, though there's a slight tendency to over-capitalize "just in case" even in some news media with professional editors. WP should not do that, since sources do not do it with anything approaching consistency, unless there's some particular exception I haven't noticed (if there is, then do it for that exception, not generally). The closest I've run across is [i|I]ndigenous Australians as a blanket term for 'the Aboriginals plus the Torres Strait Islanders', but it's not always capitalized, and it is not a consistently used term ("native Australians", etc., also occur in RS, and it seems most common to name them both specifically instead of using a catch-all; our own article at Indigenous Australians says in its lead, "Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people is preferred by many; First Nations of Australia, First Peoples of Australia, and First Australians are also increasingly common terms"). Capitalized Indigenous Australians appears to be some .gov.au officialese, an artificial categorization created for administrative purposes, and it is thus a WP:Specialized style fallacy to insist on it at WP, except at Indigenous Australians itself, our article on the term/concept.
Aside: It seems unfortunate and verging on unencyclopedic for us to have so much historical but commingled/confused content in that article, when it really belongs separated out at
Aboriginal Australians and
Torres Strait Islanders, and related articles on the early history, European colonization, and modern demographics of .au, with
Indigenous Australians reduced to an article on the term/categorization, with just a
WP:SUMMARY of historical matters using {{
Main}}
and other cross-references to point to the bulk of the material in its more proper contexts. (But that's a content not a style matter, so it's a bit off-topic here.)
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SMcCandlish
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13:51, 14 January 2020 (UTC)
The capitalisation of Spanish wine appellations seems to be different on different pages. In the Template:Spanish wine regions the categories are Vino de calidad, Vino de Pago, Denominación de origen (DO), and Denominación de origen Calificada (DOCa), and in text they appear as 'Vino de Pago' or 'vino de pago'. On the page Denominación de origen they are 'denominación de origen protegida ('protected denomination of origin')' and 'denominación de origen calificada ('denomination of qualified origin')'. On the Spanish government site they are 'Denominación de Origen, Vino de la Tierra, Denominación de Origen Calificada, Vino de Calidad con indicación geográfica , Vino de Pago' in titles, and then lower case in the text, but Spanish follows different capitalisation than English. [1]
What capitalisation should be used?
Also, the Denominación de origen title is in italics: should the Vino de calidad and Vino de Pago etc also be in italics? Fpr155 ( talk) 12:02, 7 January 2020 (UTC)
References
At Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Capital letters/Archive 30#Expanded forms of abbreviations, it says:
It seems confusing that it says not to use FOREX (foreign exchange) and then immediately afterwards says it's OK to use BX (from "base exchange") if it seems necessary. Are we saying that it's not necessary specifically for FOREX for some reason, or is it about adding the word "from", or ...? —[ AlanM1( talk)]— 18:16, 16 January 2020 (UTC)
If it came to a choice between A) "Never even use the italics, because even 'base exchange' is obvious, our readers do not generally have brain damage, and we don't want anyone to wikilawyer about it", vs. B) "I love 'base exchange' style, so let's force it on everything, like 'National Basketball Association'", then count me in for option A.
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SMcCandlish
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How are we to understand the examples in this bullet point. There seems to be, at minimum, a word missing:
I thought it was trying to say that scuba and laser shouldn't be capitalized but ZIP Code and bank PIN were exceptions and should be. So I changed it to read:
Deor reverted this saying, "Change said that ZIP & PIN were wrong. That's not correct." I'm not sure I understand this either. ~ Kvng ( talk) 18:25, 13 January 2020 (UTC)
This n-gram would seem to indicate (aside from the total death of "Z.I.P. [c|C]ode") that if you combine sources that understand this is a proper name with an acronym in it (thus "ZIP Code") with those that know it's a proper name but either don't know ZIP is an acronym or have a house style (as many do) to write as words not as initialisms anything that is a "word acronym" not sounded out as letters (thus "Zip Code"), plus sources that realize it's an acronym but not that it's a proper name (thus "Zip code"), it's about the same number of total sources that seem to pretend to understand neither that it's a proper name nor that it contains an acronym (thus "zip code"). And in reality, it's probably more that the house style in question is just more anti-capitalization that WP is, and seeks to down-case everything its writers think they can get away with down-casing. Regardless, the kind of near-perfect consistency for "zip code" or even "Zip Code" is just not there (even after you factor in a bit of false-positive for "Zip Code" instances appearing in title-case headings when the same writer might do "zip code" in running prose). There might be enough doubt here to go with "ZIP code", on the basis that enough sources are dropping the capital C in both "ZIP code" and "zip code" cases, plus the fact that a specific instance of a ZIP code isn't a proper name; it could be seen as "a ZIP code" (a code in the text string sense) within the "ZIP Code" in the system sense. But if you just trawl through Google News and Google Books results, you'll see total chaos; all of these variants are frequent. Since there's nothing remotely like a real-world consensus that "zip" has been re-assimilated as a non-acronym, there's no case to be made for that spelling here, even there's maybe a weak one for "code", at least in some contexts.
PS: Linguistically, the cases are not similar at all: things like scuba, sonar, radar, and laser do not coincide with pre-existing words; the fact that ZIP does (and the word in any of its senses has no relation to ZIP codes) makes it especially difficult for it to transition into a word from an acronym. Similarly, all the attempts by certain news publishers [principally British, but The New York Times is also in on it] to rejigger AIDS (the HIV disease) as "Aids", out of their weird habit of writing things like "Nato", "Nasa" and "Unesco", have come to rather little avail, in large part because "aids" is already a verb with little in common with AIDS (a rather opposite relationship, really, since a frequently fatal autoimmune disease doesn't help/assist anyone :-).
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The article Gerard 't Hooft includes sentences like
't Hooft is most famous for his contributions to the development of gauge theories in particle physics.
My first reaction was that this should be capitalised at the start of a sentence ('T Hooft is most famous...
), as would be done with any other lower-case particule like de or von. However, my changes were reverted by
User:TimothyRias. I now notice that on other articles like
's-Hertogenbosch, the first letter is not capitalised even at the start of a sentence. Is this correct? And if so, should
MOS:LCITEMS be amended to note this exception?
Opera hat (
talk)
15:53, 19 February 2020 (UTC)
The current Wikipedia policy is at a cross with the common policy of scientific literature and most hobbyist literature. Outside Wikipedia, common names of species are capitalized. This is to distinguish a species from a descriptive name. E.g. Little Owl is a particular species Athene noctua and little owl is any of several tens of species of small owls, or a chick of a large owl. Worse, the current Wikipedia policy puts competent people off contributing to Wikipedia, see e.g. the discussion: https://www.birdforum.net/showpost.php?p=3998544&postcount=292 and the following posts: https://www.birdforum.net/showthread.php?t=373802&page=12 As not to waste the effort, this policy can be allowed only in new edits. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 87.102.169.130 ( talk) 12:13, 11 May 2020 (UTC)
More to the core point, though, see MOS:CAPS rule no. 1: WP doesn't capitalize that which isn't almost invariably capitalized in independent reliable sources (which does not just mean specialized sources, but also includes dictionaries, newspapers, etc.). As we saw with birds, even scientific journals that are not ornithology-specific generally do not permit the capitalization of common names of bird species (even in an ornithology article), despite ornithology journals mostly (but not universally) preferring the practice. Next, there's no such thing as a WP rule (and MoS is a guideline, not a "policy") which only applies to new material. WP just doesn't do grandfather clauses. (The one time I can recall that someone – an admin and then-member of WP:ARBCOM, closing an RfC – tried to impose one, the community just flat-out ignored that, and applied the RfC result consistently regardless of topic, article age, or WP:GA/ WP:FA status, because that's just how it works here.) It should also be noted that the cleanup of the overcapitalization was labor-intensive and took several years (just as the putsch to forcibly capitalize all that stuff also took years and generated a never-ending torrent of WP:DRAMA). Changing "trivial" style matters without very good reason is a poor idea, and comes with serious editorial productivity and goodwill costs.
The anon is wrong in other ways, most obviously this: It simply isn't true as a general matter that "common names of species are capitalized", even in specialist literature. In most fields of biology, the exact opposite is true, and many of them have an explicit convention against such over-capitalization (including for mammals in particular). About the only specialist literature that fairly regularly does capitalize vernacular names are in ornithology, the insectology subfields that study flying insects (they picked up the habit from ornithology), herpetology (sometimes, and via the same vector), and botany in the UK in particular; in almost all other cases, lower case predominates even in specialized academic literature. The habit of fanciers capitalizing bird names more broadly is mostly unrelated, and was picked up from field guides, which have frequently use the technique of capitalizing (and often boldfacing or otherwise marking up) anything on which they have an entry, as a signal that it is something that has an entry. Consequently, hobbyists and fanciers and armchair experts of all sorts have a strong tendency to capitalize just about anything for which a field guide or similar "topical encyclopedia" work exists alongside a bunch of dedicated online forums (e.g. rocks and minerals, wild mammals, car parts, electronics components, martial arts techniques, dance moves, etc.). The fact that birdwatchers and professional ornithologists both like to capitalize bird common names is accidental convergence, and is a habit which non-specialized publications largely ignore.
See, e.g., n-grams for "a bald eagle" vs. "a Bald Eagle"
[3] – lower case overwhelmingly dominates, despite the results including ornithological and birdwatcher publications, and worse yet for the capitalization case, the ratio of capitalization has decreased by an order of magnitude since the 1980s. One of the most common bird species of Europe is the rock partridge, but this is so infrequently capitalized in books that it doesn't even rate
[4]. Another super-common one is the white stork, and lower-case results dominate
[5]. Similar again for passenger pigeon
[6] (once one of the most common birds in North America, now extinct, and about which a tremendous amount has been written and published, including a lot of academic material about its extinction). You only get opposite, pro-capitalization n-gram results with very obscure bird species (i.e., those about which non-ornithological literature is rare). Same goes for herpetology: try the world-record largest caudate, the Chinese giant salamander, so rarely capitalized in publication it doesn't rate
[7]. Similarly, winged insects
[8] just don't show up frequently capitalized in books. Same goes for British plants
[9]. The specialist-publication preferences have virtually no effect on general-audience publishing. We find the same is true with regard to all specialist-overcapitalized topics, from music and fiction genres to military terminology to gamer jargon to outdoors (hiking, climbing, biking, etc.) lingo. It's the same pattern of specialists capitalizing certain very-special-to-us terms in a "signifying" way (see
MOS:SIGCAPS), when communicating with other specialists, while the rest of the world ignores this as a poor writing habit. The old saw that there's an amiguity between "a little [i.e. any small] owl" and "the Little Owl" is, of course, resolved by actually writing well, e.g. "the
little owl (Athene noctua), a species endemic to Eurasia and North Africa". (
—
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ 😼
08:26, 24 May 2020 (UTC)
It's actually interesting to read the birdforum.net thread [10] in which the BIRDCON canvassing was injected in 2014. Here's some great quotes from participants at that site – user Richard Klim: "I quite like the widespread use of leading capitals for English vernacular names within the 'birding' community. But I think it's unrealistic to expect this practice to be followed in more general or scientific literature." and "I still fail to understand why birders are so concerned about this. Capitalisation of vernacular names has become the norm in English-language birding literature, and will surely remain so. But it's unusual to capitalise species names in scientific or more general literature, and it's reasonable that Wikipedia should have a consistent policy for all biological classes rather than pandering to the whims of a particular hobby group. So what...?!" and "But however strongly you/we feel about it, I don't think that the capitalisation of vernacular species names is likely to be adopted in mainstream literature anytime soon...". User fugl: "Indeed, as I said, who cares what Wikipedia does? We have our conventions, they have theirs." User Mysticete: "I can say that as far as science publications go, I am unaware of any journal for mammals which capitalizes Mammal common names. This is in contrast with Birds, where the majority of journal do so. So I would say, yes...capitalization of birds common names is largely a phenomena of the ornithological journals[.] Having recently submitted a wave of papers with common names of pinnipeds, this has sometimes snuck through the editing and resulted in edits during peer review." Now contrast this with the agitators there: User Nutcracker: "Be interesting to see what happens now. I'd recommend that all those who prefer capitalised English names resign from wikipedia if they are not allowed to captialise names any more. ... I gave up editing wikipedia some years ago"; and user Michael Retter: "If you think official English bird names should be capitalized, please take just a moment to share your thoughts as to why at at this link [i.e., to the BIRDCON RfC] .... We who support this [pro-capitalization] convention are currently losing 3:1." The meatpuppetry attempt was detected and called out in the RfC, though it actually just completely failed to rouse the rabble with a warcry; users of birdforum.net were generally too reasonable to drink the "give me my typography or give me death" Kool-Aid.
Now check out the two newer links the anon provided. Here's some quotes from the first [11], and just the first page of it – user Paul Clapham: "Well, the IOC World Bird List says [details on their naming standards elided] ... but they don't rank as an 'authority'." (This debate has always been about the IOC names in particular.) User Jurek: "I really think that there should be at least one public, free database of birds of the world to give back to the community which gives free records and free support for conservation." And user gusasp in reply: "I know one – Wikipedia! All of us can contribute as of right now. If we work together, we'll have it up to date in no time. I'm actually surprised how little engagement there is to edit this wonderful resource. It's there, ready to use and to contribute to." More from user Jurek: "... it makes sense contributing. ... If you can do it on English Wikipedia it would be wonderful. Many bird articles look like abandoned, waiting to be filled with information." and "... just 1-2 birders with enough time could potentially make the bird section a very informative resource. ... I was very sceptical about Wikipedia initially. ...[but] people are posting even some good quality bird photos, so it might become an useful tool for birders." User Viator: "They have very explicit rules on this which mandate lower case [link to MOS:LIFE here]. This was debated quite some time ago from memory and irrespective of the birding community that is their position." User Taphrospilus: "I found many errors in Avibase [an independent ornithology wiki] e.g wrong or no references." The thread is at least 13 pages long, very little of it has anything to do with Wikipedia, and the majority of it is complaints about various other resources (Avibase, HBW, BirdLife Illustrated, the IOC lists, Birds of the World, etc.) and conflicts between them, and most especially concerns about over-reliance on common/vernacular names and treating any of them as "official". The second link provided by the anon [12] is simply one post from the same thread. It (by user DMW) claims, "I recall that a lot of Wikipedia's bird description editors left after an administrator unilaterally decided that all common names must be lower case". Except neither element of this legend is true. Two editors quit (and may well have returned by now; I have not checked), and the decision was made by the community – not some loose-cannon admin – after 10+ years of excessive debate about the matter in which (using birdforum.net as a meatpuppet recruitment venue repeatedly since at least 2008) the pro-caps side made their case as strong as it possibly could be made, yet by their own reckoning were outnumbered 3-to-1 on the matter. The RfC was even closed by an admin who said he'd prefer that it went the other direction – the diametric opposite of a supervote. Since that time, various things have become much clearer, most notably that the community has little patience left for WP:BATTLEGROUND antics over style trivia, that MOS:CAPS is not broken (in RM and other discussions every single day we routinely down-case that which is not consistently capitalized in independent RS), and IOC itself did not become the global authority it wanted to be and which many people 5 to 10 years ago predicted that it would. The case for capitalizing common names of species of birds or anything else is even weaker in 2020 than it was in 2014 when we had that RfC.
Meanwhile, the evidence before us is exactly the opposite of what the anon would like us to believe. The regulars at birdforum.net today are not only concerned about lack of a good, editable bird-specific information resource, they're talking about doing concerted work on our articles to help it be that resource. There simply is no thick knot of them agitating to engage in a capitalization war, nor agitating against Wikipedia generally (at least not since 2014 when a user at both that site and ours, and a likeminded former user of ours, tried to stir their pot in such a manner). PS: In the original 2014 thread, after the RfC had closed, someone (user AlexC) at birdforum.net thought the lower-casing move was impractical: "To adjust the copy of over 10,000 articles to make sure there's no capitalized names throughout is a near impossible task." Yet we actually got in done in a year or so, and without it being a concerted effort, just general
WP:GNOME activity (and in spite of hostile, tendentious counter-activity by a couple of birders). It actually took much longer to track down and undo the over-capitalization that the same pro-caps people had imposed on other organisms (after agreeing not to do that); I was finding improperly capitalized monkeys, bats, rodents, and other things as recently as 2018, when I think we finally got the last of them. The lesson being that if you permit some micro-topic its own "magically special" exemption, this leads over time to general stylistic chaos that is much harder to manage or undo. It creeps like an infection from topic to topic.
—
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ 😼
09:01, 24 May 2020 (UTC)
So according to WP:TOURDAB and following sections, editors in the area of pop music tours have been naming the tour articles consistently with title case, in conformity with that guideline. For example, Category:Led Zeppelin concert tours, Category:Pink Floyd concert tours, and Category:Pearl Jam concert tours, except for a stray parenthetical disambiguation, "Tour" is always capitalized. This seems counterintuitive to MOS:CAPS. Granted, some bands give their tours proper names, and in the case of a proper name, a tour may be given title case. But absent a proper name, when Wikipedia is just throwing something on an article title, it seems to me that "tour" or "world tour" should be lower case. Comments? Elizium23 ( talk) 17:52, 2 March 2020 (UTC)
I have a question about this bit:
Doctrines, philosophies, theologies, theories, movements, methods, processes, systems of thought and practice, and fields of study are not capitalized, unless the name derives from a proper name: lowercase republican refers to a system of political thought; uppercase Republican refers to a specific Republican party (each being a proper name).
I'm a bit confused by the example, since it seems to be saying that 'republican' and 'Republican' are proper names, but in fact 'republican' is an adjective, not a proper name. And 'Republican' can be either a common noun (as in 'Many Republicans voted at my polling place') or an adjective (as in 'That was a very Republican thing to say') depending on context. But it's not really a proper name ever, though 'Republican Party' is a proper name of a party. Can someone clarify what this is supposed to mean? Shinealittlelight ( talk) 17:35, 8 March 2020 (UTC)
(each being a proper name)is meant to refer to
uppercase Republican refers to a specific Republican partyonly, i.e., each of Republican Party (Liberia), Republican Party (Malawi), Republican Party (United States), etc..As you said, as an adjective, it can be either " republican ideology" (common, lower-case), while in "the Republican candidate for the 99th district of Ohio", it is proper and upper-case. Both noun examples could go either way, depending on the exact meaning, too. In the US, at least, common usage of the term would usually refer specifically to members of the party (and be cap'd). —[ AlanM1( talk)]— 21:26, 8 March 2020 (UTC)
But then it's not entirely clear why it should be "the Me Too movement", as in our article Me Too movement, rather than "the me too movement". It's not one specific organization, which argues against capitalizing, but on the other hand it's not as general as "environmentalist". Peter coxhead ( talk) 11:24, 9 March 2020 (UTC)
So, trying to define movements and the like in "proper name" terms in the guideline simply begs the question and turns the reasoning circular. E.g., trainspotters frequently argue at RMs related to transit/transport topics that "Foo Bar station" or "Aybeeseeville–Eckswyzeetown line" must have capitalized "station" and "line", because they "are" proper names, because signage has the words capitalized. (Meanwhile, the same signs actually capitalize every single word on them in many cases, even "of" and "the".) There is no end to the tortured reasoning that misc. editors will use to arrive at a "my pet topic must be a Proper Name" result. MoS rarely uses "proper name" [or "proper noun"], and generally does so only in contexts in which the meaning of the notion is not regularly bound up in disputes about the exact style question addressed by the line in which MoS is using the term "proper name". But in this case, the
fallacy of equivocation runs thick and hot in virtually any thread about whether this or that movement, school of thought, doctrine, philosophy, etc., should or should not be capitalized. "Proper name" will be taken to mean whatever someone wants it to mean so they can be
WP:WINNING. :-/ The still-practical way out of this is the status quo to default to lower case unless for a specific topic the sources overwhelmingly capitalize it.
—
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ 😼
09:18, 24 May 2020 (UTC)
This sentence on this section of the Manual of Style contradicts what I read on the specific section about music:"In English, capitalization is primarily needed for proper names, acronyms, and for the first letter of a sentence." See? It clearly says "the first letter of a sentence" but does NOT talk about "the last word of a sentence" as the section about music does. What is wrong with whoever wrote this? -- Fandelasketchup ( talk) 15:08, 24 May 2020 (UTC)
Do we have a guideline about whether and when to adopt the title-case capping of NRHP listings? Quite a few things are capped only because they are on the register; e.g. Laconia Passenger Station, Alton Bay Railroad Station. Dicklyon ( talk) 22:00, 16 May 2020 (UTC)
Hope this is the best Talk page for this.
This sprang out of the article title discussion on Talk:Four_Past_Midnight and is ref Titles of Works connected to printed works, esp novels, poems, and also plays, musical/opera libretti etc.
A writer's choice of grammar, spelling, capitalisation, and so on, is just as much protected by copright law under the Berne Convention as any other authorial choice.
The 'right to make reproductions' aspect of the convention prohibits alteration of those authorial choices. When we italicise the title of a novel, we are stating it as the actual title of the work, and therefore essentially reproducing the author's work, including their choices with regard to capital letters.
They have the right to make choices of how things appear on the page; and even when they don't particularly exercise that right, they still have it.
Publishers only impose their house or some graphic style if the author has agreed to that, even if by tacit acquiescence. That aspect is part of the negotiation with a publisher, and sometimes an author makes it clear that they have made a different creative choice for the work. For an example of this, see books such as House of Leaves, where the text is printed in many different directions on the pages, and in specific fonts.
Where there is a question about this, our policy really ought to be that we check to see if we can find the author's intention for the title before we apply any other case or style. Which might be a little more work, but seriously, Four past Midnight should never have happened in the first place. -- BessieMaelstrom ( talk) 22:15, 24 May 2020 (UTC)
Greetings to all,
A Request for comment has been initiated regarding RfC about whether to allow use of honorofic 'Allama' with the names or not?
Requesting your comments to formalize the relevant policy @ Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Islam-related articles
Thanks
Bookku ( talk) 17:53, 9 July 2020 (UTC)
Please see
regarding a contradiction between
and
96.244.220.178 ( talk) 03:57, 12 July 2020 (UTC)
Can someone please look into the recent edit history of Mountain State University? An unregistered editor is insisting that "The Academy" is a proper noun and refuses to discuss the issue in Talk so it would be helpful to have the opinion of another editor. Thanks! ElKevbo ( talk) 04:32, 19 June 2020 (UTC)
Multiple news outlets, including AP and NYT, have recently moved to capitalizing 'Black'. Does that mean we should discuss moving to that? —valereee ( talk) 22:31, 15 July 2020 (UTC)
An administrator has begun an edit war at Georgetown University, insisting that "college" in the article is a proper noun and thus should be capitalized. Can someone else please provide an opinion? Thanks! ElKevbo ( talk) 22:43, 29 May 2020 (UTC)