![]() | 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 35 | ← | Archive 38 | Archive 39 | Archive 40 | Archive 41 |
I tried to create a RfC at Talk:Traditional chiefs of Palau#RfC about the capitalisation of Palauan chief titles, but that didn't work. Basically the titles are always capitalised in the main newspaper of Palau ( Island Times) as well as on French Wikipedia ( Ibedul ). In Palauan dictionaries they are considered proper nouns (see the wiktionary article Ibedul). I am not sure if you would capitalise them on Wikipedia e.g. "ibedul of Koror" as you wouldn't capitalise similar words such as king if it was not before a person's name e.g. king of France. Sahaib ( talk) 14:17, 2 January 2024 (UTC)
The word native is consistently capped in the article as a shortened form of Native Americans which might reasonably be capped per guidance but I don't think the shortened form should be? Cinderella157 ( talk) 02:27, 7 November 2023 (UTC)
PS: The vast majority of our content appears to be using these words properly lower-cased when appropriate, including "indigenous" in reference to the Americas a whole or south of the North American populations for whom it has become conventional to use "Indigenous". But any given article somtimes has scattered exceptions in it from drive-by "corrections" (e.g. one section of Arawak had "Indigenous" capitalization inserted by a single person who also capitalized a bunch of other stuff in MOS:SIGCAPS-unaware fashion, like "International Indigenous Rights Activist" and "a Pan-Tribal & Multi-Racial Indigenous NGO"), and at least one article needs to move back to lower-case ( Genetic history of Indigenous peoples of the Americas). — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 08:26, 6 January 2024 (UTC)
The native people of Americaor
The indigenous peoples of the American continent) it is lower case. In most uses of native I saw on that page, it should be capitalised (
the peace agreement should include the surrender of Native guns, same as
Native Americans) as a descriptor of a specific ethnic group, the same way Indian is. That’s the same reason Aboriginal and First Nations are capitalised (and why indigenous is mostly not). — HTGS ( talk) 22:02, 23 November 2023 (UTC)
I notice at Ayurveda that every or nearly every occurrence of the word (and the ayurvedic adjectival form) is capitalized, but it does not seem to be a proper noun, any more than chiropractic, homeopathy, traditional Chinese medicine, etc. This seems to be a clear-cut MOS:SIGCAPS and MOS:DOCTCAPS case, of boosters of the topic capitalizing it to make it seem more important. But I guess it's worth discussing before I go on a lower-casing spree. And I think it's better discussed here than at a page that tends to be beset with ayurveda proponents, though I'll drop a notice there. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 12:32, 2 November 2023 (UTC)
Is there any place in the guidelines that says demonyms (e.g., Hoosier, Carioca, New Yorker) should be capitalized? I see that demonyms are included in a list of examples of capitalized terms in MOS:HYPHENCAPS, but that does not seem sufficient so me, since it is not a direct statement saying they should be capitalized. — BarrelProof ( talk) 19:24, 9 October 2023 (UTC)
... is just one example of an event name that's over-capitalized in hundreds of articles. "Women's 100m Breaststroke" is another (not to mention that it needs a space between the number and the m). There are dozens more such events. They're mostly the same set of articles, e.g. East Germany at the 1980 Summer Olympics, across various countries and years, and some non-Olympic articles, too. Sorry I'm not able to work on those for now. Dicklyon ( talk) 06:16, 4 October 2023 (UTC)
I notice an awful lot of DEFAULTSORT keys are capitalized like title case, as opposed to sentence case. Is there a guideline some place that would suggest one way or the other? Dicklyon ( talk) 21:04, 30 October 2023 (UTC)
In the redirect titles Barbie & Her Sisters in A Pony Tale and Barbie and Her Sisters in The Great Puppy Adventure, are "A Pony Tale" and "The Great Puppy Adventure" properly treated as embedded titles, per MOS:THETITLE? Or should the "A" and "The" be lowercase? I'm thinking they're embedded titles, but the user marking them as "miscapitalized" disagrees. Dicklyon ( talk) 03:31, 19 September 2023 (UTC)
A Pony Taleand
The Great Puppy Adventureare
A Pony Taleis not a subtitle, as there is no colon or en dash. It should therefore follow the capitalization conventions of TITLECAPS, which says that a and the are not capitalized. InfiniteNexus ( talk) 05:41, 19 September 2023 (UTC)
A Pony Taleand
The Great Puppy Adventure(however capitalised) these are not embedded titles as described in the guidance. They do have a semblance of being a subtitle but are not formatted as a subtitle by using a dash, colon or parenthesis - nor do I see this being done in sources. Consequently, I don't think we should treat this as a subtitle in respect to the guidance that would lead us to capitalise the words in question. A Google search looking at the usual movie sites that are often used as sources show mixed capitalisation on the point in question. If we defer to the general advice at MOS:CAPS, we would lowercase the subject words. That would be my reading of things. Cinderella157 ( talk) 12:11, 19 September 2023 (UTC)
Lorem Ipsum of A Christmas Carol, or
Lorem Ipsum of Lorem Ipsum and The Odyssey. InfiniteNexus ( talk) 21:41, 19 September 2023 (UTC)
; or,–style subtitles that were popular in classic literature are no longer prevalent. Per MOS:TITLECAPS, words like "the" and "in" are not capitalized in titles of works; this is an extremely straightforward case, and I can guarantee you every single editor from WP:FILM will tell you the same thing. InfiniteNexus ( talk) 05:20, 27 September 2023 (UTC)
"An Examination of The Americans: The Anachronisms in FX's Period Spy Drama", in which
"An Examination of The Americans: The Anachronisms in FX's Period Spy Drama"is the title of a chapter and
The Americansis the title of a TV series. To copy-and-paste my earlier comment, "embedded title" means that the title of Work A is being quoted in the title of Work B. There is consensus above that we are not dealing with subtitles due to the lack of a colon or dash; it is exceedingly rare for an exception be granted, and I see no reason an exception should be granted in this case. InfiniteNexus ( talk) 05:56, 27 September 2023 (UTC)
"(Now and Then There's) A Fool Such as I". See also Barbie in A Mermaid Tale, etc. -- SarekOfVulcan (talk) 15:01, 28 September 2023 (UTC)
I've exhausted everything I have to say, but I'll repeat that we always conform to our own MoS rather than follow how organizations (or even sources) style the trademarks they own. For film articles in particular, we never conform to stylization in logos. But I'm not going to continue wasting time pushing a change to a set of redirects about a series of obscure, animated, low-budget, direct-to-DVD films. So, do as you please. InfiniteNexus ( talk) 14:46, 28 September 2023 (UTC)
... the TV-episode article Marge Simpson in: "Screaming Yellow Honkers", the title of which would be given as "Marge Simpson in: 'Screaming Yellow Honkers'" in running text.What we have here is basically the same kind of case, except that the "story name" within the real-world work title doesn't have its own quotation marks around it. I think I would be inclined to treat these as embedded titles. I could write a paper titled "The Impact of Harr's A Civil Action" and a book titled Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings and 21st-century Views on Race, both with embedded titles treated as titles (no lowercasing of the A or The). If we already have a MOS:TITLES rule addressing "Screaming Yellow Honkers" as an embedded title albeit a fictive one that doesn't actually refer to a separate work, what would be the rationale for not applying it to the Barbie cases? (Someone might even make a MOS:CONFORM argument to change them to Barbie and Her Sisters in "The Great Puppy Adventure", etc., though I don't think I would go that far.) Anyway, the Barbie cases are qualitatively different from the other works mentioned as allegedly analogous (Harry Potter, Indiana Jones, etc.), which are cases of a character name followed by a situation or nemesis or partner. The only at-first-dubious one in that set was Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings in which it was not immediately clear whether there was a legend (real or fictive) about ten rings or a work (real or fictive) titled The Legend of the Ten Rings, but it turned out to be the former. We might have a problem if something called Harry Potter and [t|T]he Book of the Spirits came out. We'd have to determine whether this refered to something described as "the book of the spirts" or something literally titled The Book of the Spirits within the narrative. Logicking this stuff out leans me more and more toward accepting Barbie and Her Sisters in The Great Puppy Adventure as preferred by the publisher, because it appears to mean "Barbie and her sisters in the story named 'The Great Puppy Adventure'" not "Barbie and her sisters in an adventure about puppies, and it happened to be great". It's the same "character-name[s] in story-name" format as "Marge Simpson in: 'Screaming Yellow Honkers'", just with less punctuation (and the colon in the latter was really quite unnecessary). That said, the usage in independent sources is mixed; I think this is because of the amgiguity caused by there being no punctuation at all. If the title had been Barbie and Her Sisters in "The Great Puppy Adventure" (or even Barbie and Her Sisters in: The Great Puppy Adventure), there would be no question at all in anyone's mind, on-site or off-site. It's not a hill I would die on, because of the general default at the top of MOS:CAPS to go lower-case if in doubt, but I've argued elsewhere that more specific guidelines like MOS:PROPERNAME (and MOS:TITLES by extension) are necessarily codified exceptions to this principle or they could not exist in the guidelines at all.
Side point: There is not actually a requirement that a subtitle be preceded by a colon or dash, or be wrapped in parentheses (round brackets), to be a subtitle. A lot of works from the mid-20th century on back used other formats, e.g. The Hobbit, or There and Back Again, and these formats varied a lot. E.g. Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus; these were sometimes presented without any punctuation (Foo or The Bar) in the original publications, though punctuation is sometimes added by later writer for clarity or to comply with a particular style guide. Sometimes "being" or other terms were used in place of "or". An unusual modern case is Star Trek Into Darkness, in which it turned out reliably sourceable that this was word-play, both meaning "a star trek into darkness" ("a trek into darness, among the stars", "a trek between the stars, leading into darkness", however you like to parse it) and being a subtitle to be interpreted as "Star Trek: Into Darkness", with the colon intentionally omitted to produce the ambiguity. It's why our article is not at Star Trek into Darkness or Star Trek: Into Darkness, despite both forms attested in RS and fierce arguments here for one or the other. (Meanwhile the "exception" at Spider-Man Far From Home is no such case and has an improperly capitalized "From", against MOS:5LETTER, simply because of a lame fanboi WP:FALSECONSENSUS rooted in the WP:CSF problem: there's nearly no independnent RS coverage outside of entertainment news material and virtually all such writing uses a 4-letter rule instead of MoS's 5-letter rule. If it had been "high cinema" covered by academic film journals, they would have consistently rendered it Spider-Man: Far from Home and so would we.) — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 04:28, 7 January 2024 (UTC)
I'm in a discussion with another user about the exact meaning of the sentence "Names of planets, moons, asteroids, comets, stars, constellations, and galaxies are proper names and begin with a capital letter" in the MOS:CELESTIALBODIES section. My understanding is that this does not apply to the earth (our planet), the sun (the star it turns around), and the moon (its natural satellite), as these are already covered by the previous paragraph, which gives more detailed rules. (Capitalization in an astronomical context and in personifications, but not otherwise.) Their understanding, however, is that the sentence nevertheless refers to these three bodies too so that references to them are always to be capitalized.
What's the consensus interpretation here, assuming there is one? Maybe the page could be improved to clearly resolve the apparent ambiguity, one way or the other? Gawaon ( talk) 14:28, 17 September 2023 (UTC)
When our manual of style has micro-fine shades of meaning, as it does here, I do not believe it serves anyone. That's why there are perennial discussions, because we have rules that are based on subtle differences of context. I believe that words like sun and moon and earth never need be capitalized because it's always obvious what's being talked about. If the word we use to refer to a concept has become a common noun, it's always a common noun. There is no situation in which capitalizing "sun" is going to make it clearer to a reader that the in that instance the word means "the star around which the earth orbits" that cannot be made even clearer just be using clearer words. Moreover, that capitalization does nothing for anyone with a vision impairment; those individuals have no choice but to depend on context. Perennial arguments like this are evidence that we should shift to lower case in all contexts, and trust writing to get the job done. What's the value of creating discord and excluding the visually impaired by digging in heels about this?~ T P W 13:24, 18 September 2023 (UTC)
Gawaon ( talk) 17:46, 20 September 2023 (UTC)The words sun, moon, solar system, and universe are not generally capitalized (India was the fifth nation to land on the moon; The solar system was formed 4.6 billion years ago), except when used in personifications (Sol Invictus ('Unconquered Sun') was the ancient Roman sun god). References to our planet are written as the earth (lowercase, with article) or Earth (capitalized, no article); if other planets are mentioned as well, the latter form is usually preferable (Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars are the four terrestrial planets). It is lowercased in colloquial expressions such as what on earth.
Comment This really isn't all that hard. The words Sun, Earth, Moon ... a specific celestial body in an astronomical context
. Astronomical sense means in the context of the science of astronomy - broadly construed. Trying to have it extend to more everyday uses could be construed as pettifogging.
Cinderella157 (
talk)
23:12, 19 September 2023 (UTC)
Just wondering in looking at this, are there times we don't capitalize Jupiter or Saturn? Granted I'm old, but I've used the phrase "jumpin' jupiter" many times. Is Jupiter always lower case in this context? I assumed it would be like cases of lower case sun and earth, but I've never seen it uncapitalized in that phrase. And sure I can see that we would spell it sunrise or sun-rise, but then when NASA talks about Titan and it's lakes and throws up a photo we see a picture of Saturn-rise over Titan? It does get confusing. Fyunck(click) ( talk) 23:06, 20 September 2023 (UTC)
Yep, this is not difficult at all. If you're referring to the daystar as an astronomical object, it's "the Sun". If you're employing a derived usage, as in "lying in the sun too long" (which really means "lying in the light produced by the Sun", not "going into the Sun and lying down"), then it's "the sun". "The Moon looked red because of dust particles in the Earth's atmosphere", but "The moon hits your eye / Like a big pizza pie" and "archaeologists digging in the peaty Scottish earth for months" (an astronomical body did not come down to Earth and hit someone; Scotland does not have its own separate planet). — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 04:34, 7 January 2024 (UTC)
You may be interested in a proposal on whether to capitalize the "Draft" in National Football League Draft, taking place at the village pump. (this is a copy of the duplicated notification posted to the project page Wikipedia talk:WikiProject National Football League. Dicklyon ( talk) 22:16, 6 January 2024 (UTC)
Please see Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style#"Acronyms in page titles" is mis-placed in an MoS page. In short, the material needs to move to a naming-conventions guideline, but which page? — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 15:19, 12 January 2024 (UTC)
It's been four years since the last RfC on this ended in no consensus, and seven years since the Associated Press stopped capitalizing it, prompting Wired to write an article headlined with " The AP Finally Realizes It's 2016, Will Let Us Stop Capitalizing 'Internet'". Is there appetite to try another RfC, or is this something more easily solved with a brief discussion on this page? Ed [talk] [OMT] 08:27, 2 December 2023 (UTC)
WP is not in a position to base its style decisions on vague notions about slow language change; we only do what the preponderance of recent reliable sources do. (This is why WP took several years to jump on the singular-they bandwagon, and was a decade behind the times in dropping commas from constructions like "John X. Smith, Jr."; we had to wait until the sourceable proof of a general shift in usage was incontrovertible.) Note here that even with "Nasa" being a human name or other word in various languages, "NASA" clearly dominates, as does "UNICEF" over "Unicef", despite multiple British and a few American news publishers preferring the "Unicef" weirdness. WP uses laser and radar and scuba and maser because these are the overwhelmingly dominant usage in sources, are written this way in almost all dictionaries, and the average person has no idea they even originated as acronyms. Assimilation of technical acronyms as non-acronym words happens fairly often, but virtually never happens with organizational names. The only almost-example I can think if is IKEA which is an acronym, but many people do not know that and fairly often write it as "Ikea" [4]. In the end, WP would be unlikely to switch to "Unicef" even if usage slid into a slight majority, until it became an overwhelming majority, because our general principle is to not make unusual stylistic exceptions unless independent sources are overwhelmingly consistent in preferring that specific exception for that specific case (see MOS:TM, etc.). — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 03:41, 2 January 2024 (UTC)
only words and phrases that are consistently capitalized in a substantial majority of independent, reliable sources are capitalized in Wikipedia. And that hasn't been true of "internet" for years. Popcornfud ( talk) 02:54, 2 January 2024 (UTC)
I said nothing remotely like "it's capitalized, because it's capitalized".
substantial majority, which has not existed for years now. (Edit: or, as you yourself say above, "we only do what the preponderance of recent reliable sources do").The fact that this majority no longer exists has even been written about in reliable sources. The "confusing magical exception" at this point is very much Wikipedia's. Popcornfud ( talk) 04:29, 2 January 2024 (UTC)
To get to the meat of the matter: Nothing about what I have presented is at all circular, and "whether to treat 'internet' as a proper noun is the entire question" is completely incorrect. Popcornfud is sorely confusing "proper name" AKA "proper noun" with "something that starts with a capital letter", and there simply is no such one-to-one correspondence. E.g. "ATM" is capitalized, for being an acronym/intialism conventionally presented that way (" scuba" and " laser" being acronyms that are not). This does not make "ATM" or its expansion " automated teller machine" a proper name. Meanwhile, " iPhone" and " tvOS" absolutely are proper names, but do not begin with capital letters (it's pure accident that they contain any at all); danah boyd is another (with none). The following is going to be quite long, because we have a lot catch-up ground to cover (though I just remembered this is covered in more detail at WP:Proper names and proper nouns).
See the article Proper noun: "A proper noun is a noun that identifies a single entity and is used to refer to that entity (Africa; Jupiter; Sarah; Tesla, Inc.) as distinguished from a common noun, which is a noun that refers to a class of entities (continent, planet, person, corporation) and may be used when referring to instances of a specific class (a continent, another planet, these persons, our corporation). "The Internet" by definition is a proper noun; "an internet" (AKA "an inter-network", "a WAN") is by definition a common noun. If you prefer the more esoteric approach of Proper name (philosophy) (which generally has no implications for WP titles and spelling, but we might as well cover it anyway): "a proper name – examples include a name of a specific person or place – is a name which ordinarily is taken to uniquely identify its referent in the world." Further, in direct reference theory (which now dominates in the philosophy of proper names) "the only meaning of a proper name is its referent". Even under this level of abstraction, "the Internet" is by definition a proper name and "an internet" cannot be one. (If you don't like our articles, see their sources and other reliable sources on the same matters; our articles are in fact summarizing them well.) There simply is no confusion about whether "the Internet" is a proper name except among people who do not actually understand what "proper name" AKA "proper noun" actually means. And it does not intrinsically have anything to do with capitalization; proper names exist in languages with writing systems that do not have letter case. People with no background in linguistics really should not try to get into linguistic arguments. This is often why MoS disputation is so recurrent, lengthy, and tedious. Everyone feels entitled to an opinion simply on the basis of being more or less fluent in the language, but they're usually operating on entirely subjective assumption, preference, and habit.
Where capitalization comes in is that English and most other languages with a cased writing system apply capitalization to proper names (though they do this differently in various ways, e.g. English usually capitalizes adjectival forms, like "European" from the noun form "Europe", while many other languages do not). What actually matters here is that Wikipedia has a MOS:PROPERNAME rule to apply capitalization to any proper name, and an exception to this (like any exception to any MoS rule) is made only when independent reliable sources nearly always make that exception for that specific case (thus tvOS, etc.). Near-universality of an exception for "the Internet", as "the internet" (same goes for "the web"), is already proven not to be the case. The lowercase version is simply an expediency preferred by some writers/publishers's house styles (mostly in news journalism and in business/PR writing derived from it). Lower-casing as "the internet" has the reader-confusing effect of implying that "the Internet" is not a proper name and that the Internet is not a singular thing with a proper name, but is instead a class of things with a generic common-noun, non-proper name like "the domestic cat" or "the airplane/aeroplane". The only difference between the argument to lowercase "the internet" and to lowercase "the pacific ocean" is that fortunately few lazy writers are going in the latter direction (though you can be sure that as soon as they do, there'll be a bunch of people demanding to lower-case it on Wikipedia; if you don't believe me, cf. previous attempts to lower-case the Western Hemisphere just because it can occasionally be found rendered "the western hemisphere" in some sources).
PS: "Are those guys [Microsoft, etc.] confused about how computers work, too?" Nothing in this discussion is related in any way to "how computers work"; reductio ad absurdum is silly and unproductive. Corporations follow "business communication" (a.k.a. "public relations") conventions, and these are almost entirely derived from journalistic style. (For example, if you get and read any US-published manual of business/PR style – as I have, e.g. The AMA Style Guide for Business Writing and several others – you'll almost always find it explicitly deferring to the AP Stylebook on any question not specifically addressed by the book in question, never to Chicago Manual of Style or other academic-leaning style guides that our MoS is actually based on).
In short, Microsoft is obviously a reliable source for how Windows, Excel, Skype, and Xbox operate, but is not a reliable source for how to write encyclopedic English, including about Microsoft and its products. This is covered in detail at WP:SSF. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 07:12, 6 January 2024 (UTC)
Change of heart: I've sat on this for some time, and (I'm sure this will irritate a couple of people above), I no longer feel comfortable making the case for the Internet. I think the fact that MOS:PN is set up as an exception to the lead principle of MOS:CAPS is a problem instead of a solution, and that it needs revision to be an explication of how that principle applies to proper names. MOS:PN as it stands now has been a source of frequent heated conflict, with people using OR and PoV subjective ideas about what "is" and "isn't" a proper name (using whichever definition of the notion suits their present purposes) to argue in "internet forum" style, sometimes for years, to try to get the result that they want in a particular topic. Outside of parochial conflicts of this sort, the project has actually had little difficulty with proper names (under several definitions) that conventionally are lower-cased in most independent sources, from personal names like k.d. lang and danah boyd to commercial trademarks like iPhone and tvOS. It's getting harder and harder to treat the internet and the web differently, when source usage has strongly shifted toward lower-case, except mostly in a few tech-sector publications. It's complicated further by the fact that "an internet" is now rather obsolescent usage, and "the web" doesn't have any other referent. Plus, both terms are usable in a generic, lower-case sense all the time anyway ("web development" and "internet technolgies" can and often do apply to intranets and such), with the result that non-expert editors would not be certain when the capitalization should apply. I have a particular revision in mind to propose for MOS:PN, but need to think hard on any secondary implications of it and redraft as needed to avoid issues. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 09:26, 19 January 2024 (UTC)
They used the term internet as a shorthand for internetwork in RFC 675. Another good example is in the History of the Internet article, here, where it says
In general, an internet was a collection of networks linked by a common protocol. In the time period when the ARPANET was connected to the newly formed NSFNET project in the late 1980s, the term was used as the name of the network, Internet, being the large and global TCP/IP network..
@ SomethingForDeletion: At this revert by SomethingForDeletion, the question is when to capitalize Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, in the context of a major field of study offered by a university. My thought was that we only cap when it's a full department names, as Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, but not in contexts like "... many of the same courses as the College of Engineering's Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS)". Normally, if someone has a degree in a subject (say physics), we say "BS in physics", not "BS in Physics"; is it different for a school offering a "BS in Physics"? I think the only thing I did wrong in this edit was to not also lowercase some other fields, such as Computer Science in a similar context. But what do others think? Dicklyon ( talk) 16:46, 17 July 2023 (UTC)
the College of Engineering's Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS). When we are talking about a specific institution's "Bachelor of X in Y", the Y is a major/program not an academic discipline (even when it happens to have the same name as an academic discipline), so title case is correct (indeed UCB's own website puts it in title case), whereas changing that to all lower case is making it less correct. SomethingForDeletion ( talk) 10:52, 20 July 2023 (UTC)
Computer Sciences), so it really doesn't coincide with the generic noun for the field [5]. XOR'easter ( talk) 19:44, 20 July 2023 (UTC)
Department of Computer Science (title). She majored in computer science (generic).Absolutely correct. -- Necrothesp ( talk) 15:17, 24 July 2023 (UTC)
The College of Letters and Science (L&S) also offers a Bachelor of Arts in Computer Science, which requires many of the same courses as the College of Engineering's Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), but has different admissions and graduation criteria.. In that sentence neither
Bachelor of Arts in Computer Sciencenor
Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering and Computer Scienceare generic. SomethingForDeletion ( talk) 08:36, 25 July 2023 (UTC)
The College of Letters and Science (L&S) also offers a bachelor of arts in computer science, which requires many of the same courses as the College of Engineering's bachelor of science in electrical engineering and computer science (EECS), but has different admissions and graduation criteria.What's wrong with that? It's just a bachelor of arts (level of degree) in computer science (subject of degree). It's not a proper name. -- Necrothesp ( talk) 15:25, 25 July 2023 (UTC)
majors/degrees/programs are specific abstract entities, and their names are proper nouns. XOR'easter ( talk) 19:06, 3 August 2023 (UTC)
Encyclopaedia Britannica website says (
"Are school subjects proper nouns or common nouns?"): School subjects are common nouns when used generally unless they are the name of a language. Names of specific classes or courses are proper nouns.
I agree with the editors of the Britannica here. So, as a subject/discipline, physics is lowercase. But in the name of a specific educational offering (course/class/unit/degree/program/major/etc), it is a proper noun and hence title case ("Physics" not "physics").
SomethingForDeletion (
talk)
02:11, 29 July 2023 (UTC)
The central issue here is that while "Bachelor of Science in Computer Science" is the correct name of the degree and program, "bachelor of science in computer science" is also correct as a generic description. And it is not always clear which is meant in a particular usage. -- User:Khajidha ( talk) ( contributions) 16:54, 6 August 2023 (UTC)
"... many of the same courses as the College of Engineering's Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS)". In that case, it is not clear if that is a named major or an area of study. It is capitalized and linked, but when clicked, it goes to the page Computer science and engineering which is not about the named program. I think it would be a surprise for a reader to click on what appears to be a proper name, then to go to the general page about the topic. It's not different in type from clicking on University of California and being redirected to University.I have been persuaded by the discussion above that sometimes the name of a field of study can also be a major/program/etc., and hence a proper name, but more often those words are capitalized for emphasis. If the sentence had been "... many of the same courses as the College of Engineering's Bachelor of Science Electrical Engineering and Computer Science program ..." it would not be ambiguous.As I think about it, I have probably, among the hundreds of times I have knocked down capitalization of majors or fields of study, knocked down specific programs when I shouldn't have. I will be more careful about that in the future and I will try to write better to make the difference between a specific program and an area of study (a proper name and a common noun) more clear. SchreiberBike | ⌨ 13:29, 7 August 2023 (UTC)
It is capitalized and linked, but when clicked, it goes to the page Computer science and engineering which is not about the named programPersonally, I have never thought of link targets as relevant to questions like capitalisation: if we look at the sentence in its context, and it is clear that in that sentence in that context, a particular noun phrase is a proper noun, and therefore deserves title case – I don't see why that judgement would be changed by the fact that someone has wikilinked the phrase to an article whose title is a common noun. We are never going to have articles for every proper noun, and so linking a proper noun to a common noun which names some concept of which that proper noun is an instance is not necessarily wrong, but I don't think doing so is a counterargument to the case that it is a proper noun in that particular sentence and context, nor do I think it even ought to make the matter ambiguous. SomethingForDeletion ( talk) 01:26, 14 August 2023 (UTC)
For a case that doesn't seem to fall quite on one side or the other, would you capitalize "Asian Theatre" in this case? — AjaxSmack 03:10, 25 September 2023 (UTC)
"The school offers Asian Theatre as a major and has ...". Based on that sentence, I can't tell if that is a named program or major or if it is a descriptive phrase. If instead of "Asian Theatre", it said "Chemistry", it would be equally ambiguous and I'd change it to lower case with little thought. It could be rewritten as "The school's Asian Theatre program has ..." and it would be clear that it is a proper noun. The university's main page on the program could use some copy editing, but generally refers to the field of study in lower case and the program in upper case. Further reading of the college's pages show that the major is in theater and the Asian subset is called either a concentration, focus area or a program, so it appears to be an error to call it a major. I hope that helps. SchreiberBike | ⌨ 12:49, 25 September 2023 (UTC)
Use lower case for all this stuff when possible. The entire problem with the idea 'I think "She has a PhD in mechanical engineering" is fine in a biography, although "PhD in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Woolloomooloo" would also be fine if that is the actual title of the degree/program she graduated with' is that it would require WP:OR with primary sources to try to prove that one way or another, and even if you found, say, a PDF of a degree certificate from a particular university, you have no evidence that it precisely matches the one issued to the bio subject, since the names of these things vary over time, and sometimes people do custom majors/minors (I did), but may summarize them in more conventional terms. And even if you could prove it with regard to that specific bio subject, the capital letter sprinkling is meaningless to the reader and inconsistent with treatment everywhere else in our materials. As for departments, it's fine but not necessarily ideal to refer to "the Department of Basketweaving at Fancy Pants University" if you have RS proof that the actual name of the department is (and was at the pertinent time) "the Department of Basketweaving" and not "the Basketweaving Department" or "the Faculty of Basketweaving" within the "the Department of Textile Arts" or "the X. Y. Zounds School of Basketweaving", or yadda yadda yadda. And this, too, is something that may have changed over time. Even if the name that pertained to the period can be proven to be "the Department of Basketweaving", this is really descriptive, and it would not be wrong to simply write it as "the department of basketweaving" anyway, switching to purely descriptive wording that happens to coincide by pure chance with what the actual name is. This would be more consistent with other usage when the exact names of other departments is unknown (which is most of the time), would not confuse anyone, and uses fewer uppercase letters that are not strictly required, which is the WP way. PS: Yes, use "a professor of basketweaving at Fancy Pants University" but "the X. Y. Zounds Distinguished Professor of Basketweaving at Fancy Pants University"; such endowments are proper-named awards. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 21:23, 21 January 2024 (UTC)
Wikipedia relies on sources to determine what is conventionally capitalized; only words and phrases that are consistently capitalized in a substantial majority of independent, reliable sources are capitalized in Wikipedia.This is based on a strong lower-casing trend, to avoid unnecessary capitalization, across all major English-language style guides, on which MoS is based. If you think that this should be changed to something like "Wikipedia relies on editors' collective sense of what should be capitalized, to suggest importance or significance, and Wikipedia capitalizes anything found capitalized in a substantial minority of sources, especially those that are closely tied to a subject" (and MOS:SIGCAPS and MOS:DOCTCAPS should be deleted), you know how to open an RfC; same goes for everyone else in this thread and every similar one. There is usually no solid sourcing cited for what the proper name of something like this is in a specific time slot; rather, editors just assume that "Department of Foo" or "Foo Department" is the proper name without checking. Highly sub-specific and even unique department names like "Department of Neurobiology and Behavior" and "Department of Traditional and Modern Philosophy", if actually verified with RS, would surely be something to capitalize; I don't think anyone would argue otherwise. But if sources say someone is/was in the psychology department of some university, that shouldn't be capitalized without verifying it's the actual department name (or was at the relevant time period) and not just a descriptive label. Even if it was, what exact benefit is there to capitalizing it when it's that generic? What important fact is being signalled to the reader by "in the Department of Physics at Foobar University" that is not by "in the department of physics at Foobar University" or "in Foobar University's physics department" in someone's bio? Why would the reader care? And, to address other capitalization desires in this thread, why on earth would we ever write "the university's Physics department"? — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 17:18, 25 January 2024 (UTC)
MOS:LISTCAPS doesn't specify if capitalization applies to the entire table, or can change on a column-by-column basis. I.e. which takes precedence: Wikipedia avoids unnecessary capitalization.
– the very first sentence of the MOS – or If the list items are sentence fragments, then capitalization should be consistent – sentence case should be applied to either all or none of the items.
? The particular instance is a table than contains fleet numbers (a mixed number-letter string), dates, status (a single word), and notes (the last being in full sentence case).
Useddenim (
talk)
14:44, 14 February 2024 (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 35 | ← | Archive 38 | Archive 39 | Archive 40 | Archive 41 |
I tried to create a RfC at Talk:Traditional chiefs of Palau#RfC about the capitalisation of Palauan chief titles, but that didn't work. Basically the titles are always capitalised in the main newspaper of Palau ( Island Times) as well as on French Wikipedia ( Ibedul ). In Palauan dictionaries they are considered proper nouns (see the wiktionary article Ibedul). I am not sure if you would capitalise them on Wikipedia e.g. "ibedul of Koror" as you wouldn't capitalise similar words such as king if it was not before a person's name e.g. king of France. Sahaib ( talk) 14:17, 2 January 2024 (UTC)
The word native is consistently capped in the article as a shortened form of Native Americans which might reasonably be capped per guidance but I don't think the shortened form should be? Cinderella157 ( talk) 02:27, 7 November 2023 (UTC)
PS: The vast majority of our content appears to be using these words properly lower-cased when appropriate, including "indigenous" in reference to the Americas a whole or south of the North American populations for whom it has become conventional to use "Indigenous". But any given article somtimes has scattered exceptions in it from drive-by "corrections" (e.g. one section of Arawak had "Indigenous" capitalization inserted by a single person who also capitalized a bunch of other stuff in MOS:SIGCAPS-unaware fashion, like "International Indigenous Rights Activist" and "a Pan-Tribal & Multi-Racial Indigenous NGO"), and at least one article needs to move back to lower-case ( Genetic history of Indigenous peoples of the Americas). — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 08:26, 6 January 2024 (UTC)
The native people of Americaor
The indigenous peoples of the American continent) it is lower case. In most uses of native I saw on that page, it should be capitalised (
the peace agreement should include the surrender of Native guns, same as
Native Americans) as a descriptor of a specific ethnic group, the same way Indian is. That’s the same reason Aboriginal and First Nations are capitalised (and why indigenous is mostly not). — HTGS ( talk) 22:02, 23 November 2023 (UTC)
I notice at Ayurveda that every or nearly every occurrence of the word (and the ayurvedic adjectival form) is capitalized, but it does not seem to be a proper noun, any more than chiropractic, homeopathy, traditional Chinese medicine, etc. This seems to be a clear-cut MOS:SIGCAPS and MOS:DOCTCAPS case, of boosters of the topic capitalizing it to make it seem more important. But I guess it's worth discussing before I go on a lower-casing spree. And I think it's better discussed here than at a page that tends to be beset with ayurveda proponents, though I'll drop a notice there. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 12:32, 2 November 2023 (UTC)
Is there any place in the guidelines that says demonyms (e.g., Hoosier, Carioca, New Yorker) should be capitalized? I see that demonyms are included in a list of examples of capitalized terms in MOS:HYPHENCAPS, but that does not seem sufficient so me, since it is not a direct statement saying they should be capitalized. — BarrelProof ( talk) 19:24, 9 October 2023 (UTC)
... is just one example of an event name that's over-capitalized in hundreds of articles. "Women's 100m Breaststroke" is another (not to mention that it needs a space between the number and the m). There are dozens more such events. They're mostly the same set of articles, e.g. East Germany at the 1980 Summer Olympics, across various countries and years, and some non-Olympic articles, too. Sorry I'm not able to work on those for now. Dicklyon ( talk) 06:16, 4 October 2023 (UTC)
I notice an awful lot of DEFAULTSORT keys are capitalized like title case, as opposed to sentence case. Is there a guideline some place that would suggest one way or the other? Dicklyon ( talk) 21:04, 30 October 2023 (UTC)
In the redirect titles Barbie & Her Sisters in A Pony Tale and Barbie and Her Sisters in The Great Puppy Adventure, are "A Pony Tale" and "The Great Puppy Adventure" properly treated as embedded titles, per MOS:THETITLE? Or should the "A" and "The" be lowercase? I'm thinking they're embedded titles, but the user marking them as "miscapitalized" disagrees. Dicklyon ( talk) 03:31, 19 September 2023 (UTC)
A Pony Taleand
The Great Puppy Adventureare
A Pony Taleis not a subtitle, as there is no colon or en dash. It should therefore follow the capitalization conventions of TITLECAPS, which says that a and the are not capitalized. InfiniteNexus ( talk) 05:41, 19 September 2023 (UTC)
A Pony Taleand
The Great Puppy Adventure(however capitalised) these are not embedded titles as described in the guidance. They do have a semblance of being a subtitle but are not formatted as a subtitle by using a dash, colon or parenthesis - nor do I see this being done in sources. Consequently, I don't think we should treat this as a subtitle in respect to the guidance that would lead us to capitalise the words in question. A Google search looking at the usual movie sites that are often used as sources show mixed capitalisation on the point in question. If we defer to the general advice at MOS:CAPS, we would lowercase the subject words. That would be my reading of things. Cinderella157 ( talk) 12:11, 19 September 2023 (UTC)
Lorem Ipsum of A Christmas Carol, or
Lorem Ipsum of Lorem Ipsum and The Odyssey. InfiniteNexus ( talk) 21:41, 19 September 2023 (UTC)
; or,–style subtitles that were popular in classic literature are no longer prevalent. Per MOS:TITLECAPS, words like "the" and "in" are not capitalized in titles of works; this is an extremely straightforward case, and I can guarantee you every single editor from WP:FILM will tell you the same thing. InfiniteNexus ( talk) 05:20, 27 September 2023 (UTC)
"An Examination of The Americans: The Anachronisms in FX's Period Spy Drama", in which
"An Examination of The Americans: The Anachronisms in FX's Period Spy Drama"is the title of a chapter and
The Americansis the title of a TV series. To copy-and-paste my earlier comment, "embedded title" means that the title of Work A is being quoted in the title of Work B. There is consensus above that we are not dealing with subtitles due to the lack of a colon or dash; it is exceedingly rare for an exception be granted, and I see no reason an exception should be granted in this case. InfiniteNexus ( talk) 05:56, 27 September 2023 (UTC)
"(Now and Then There's) A Fool Such as I". See also Barbie in A Mermaid Tale, etc. -- SarekOfVulcan (talk) 15:01, 28 September 2023 (UTC)
I've exhausted everything I have to say, but I'll repeat that we always conform to our own MoS rather than follow how organizations (or even sources) style the trademarks they own. For film articles in particular, we never conform to stylization in logos. But I'm not going to continue wasting time pushing a change to a set of redirects about a series of obscure, animated, low-budget, direct-to-DVD films. So, do as you please. InfiniteNexus ( talk) 14:46, 28 September 2023 (UTC)
... the TV-episode article Marge Simpson in: "Screaming Yellow Honkers", the title of which would be given as "Marge Simpson in: 'Screaming Yellow Honkers'" in running text.What we have here is basically the same kind of case, except that the "story name" within the real-world work title doesn't have its own quotation marks around it. I think I would be inclined to treat these as embedded titles. I could write a paper titled "The Impact of Harr's A Civil Action" and a book titled Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings and 21st-century Views on Race, both with embedded titles treated as titles (no lowercasing of the A or The). If we already have a MOS:TITLES rule addressing "Screaming Yellow Honkers" as an embedded title albeit a fictive one that doesn't actually refer to a separate work, what would be the rationale for not applying it to the Barbie cases? (Someone might even make a MOS:CONFORM argument to change them to Barbie and Her Sisters in "The Great Puppy Adventure", etc., though I don't think I would go that far.) Anyway, the Barbie cases are qualitatively different from the other works mentioned as allegedly analogous (Harry Potter, Indiana Jones, etc.), which are cases of a character name followed by a situation or nemesis or partner. The only at-first-dubious one in that set was Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings in which it was not immediately clear whether there was a legend (real or fictive) about ten rings or a work (real or fictive) titled The Legend of the Ten Rings, but it turned out to be the former. We might have a problem if something called Harry Potter and [t|T]he Book of the Spirits came out. We'd have to determine whether this refered to something described as "the book of the spirts" or something literally titled The Book of the Spirits within the narrative. Logicking this stuff out leans me more and more toward accepting Barbie and Her Sisters in The Great Puppy Adventure as preferred by the publisher, because it appears to mean "Barbie and her sisters in the story named 'The Great Puppy Adventure'" not "Barbie and her sisters in an adventure about puppies, and it happened to be great". It's the same "character-name[s] in story-name" format as "Marge Simpson in: 'Screaming Yellow Honkers'", just with less punctuation (and the colon in the latter was really quite unnecessary). That said, the usage in independent sources is mixed; I think this is because of the amgiguity caused by there being no punctuation at all. If the title had been Barbie and Her Sisters in "The Great Puppy Adventure" (or even Barbie and Her Sisters in: The Great Puppy Adventure), there would be no question at all in anyone's mind, on-site or off-site. It's not a hill I would die on, because of the general default at the top of MOS:CAPS to go lower-case if in doubt, but I've argued elsewhere that more specific guidelines like MOS:PROPERNAME (and MOS:TITLES by extension) are necessarily codified exceptions to this principle or they could not exist in the guidelines at all.
Side point: There is not actually a requirement that a subtitle be preceded by a colon or dash, or be wrapped in parentheses (round brackets), to be a subtitle. A lot of works from the mid-20th century on back used other formats, e.g. The Hobbit, or There and Back Again, and these formats varied a lot. E.g. Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus; these were sometimes presented without any punctuation (Foo or The Bar) in the original publications, though punctuation is sometimes added by later writer for clarity or to comply with a particular style guide. Sometimes "being" or other terms were used in place of "or". An unusual modern case is Star Trek Into Darkness, in which it turned out reliably sourceable that this was word-play, both meaning "a star trek into darkness" ("a trek into darness, among the stars", "a trek between the stars, leading into darkness", however you like to parse it) and being a subtitle to be interpreted as "Star Trek: Into Darkness", with the colon intentionally omitted to produce the ambiguity. It's why our article is not at Star Trek into Darkness or Star Trek: Into Darkness, despite both forms attested in RS and fierce arguments here for one or the other. (Meanwhile the "exception" at Spider-Man Far From Home is no such case and has an improperly capitalized "From", against MOS:5LETTER, simply because of a lame fanboi WP:FALSECONSENSUS rooted in the WP:CSF problem: there's nearly no independnent RS coverage outside of entertainment news material and virtually all such writing uses a 4-letter rule instead of MoS's 5-letter rule. If it had been "high cinema" covered by academic film journals, they would have consistently rendered it Spider-Man: Far from Home and so would we.) — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 04:28, 7 January 2024 (UTC)
I'm in a discussion with another user about the exact meaning of the sentence "Names of planets, moons, asteroids, comets, stars, constellations, and galaxies are proper names and begin with a capital letter" in the MOS:CELESTIALBODIES section. My understanding is that this does not apply to the earth (our planet), the sun (the star it turns around), and the moon (its natural satellite), as these are already covered by the previous paragraph, which gives more detailed rules. (Capitalization in an astronomical context and in personifications, but not otherwise.) Their understanding, however, is that the sentence nevertheless refers to these three bodies too so that references to them are always to be capitalized.
What's the consensus interpretation here, assuming there is one? Maybe the page could be improved to clearly resolve the apparent ambiguity, one way or the other? Gawaon ( talk) 14:28, 17 September 2023 (UTC)
When our manual of style has micro-fine shades of meaning, as it does here, I do not believe it serves anyone. That's why there are perennial discussions, because we have rules that are based on subtle differences of context. I believe that words like sun and moon and earth never need be capitalized because it's always obvious what's being talked about. If the word we use to refer to a concept has become a common noun, it's always a common noun. There is no situation in which capitalizing "sun" is going to make it clearer to a reader that the in that instance the word means "the star around which the earth orbits" that cannot be made even clearer just be using clearer words. Moreover, that capitalization does nothing for anyone with a vision impairment; those individuals have no choice but to depend on context. Perennial arguments like this are evidence that we should shift to lower case in all contexts, and trust writing to get the job done. What's the value of creating discord and excluding the visually impaired by digging in heels about this?~ T P W 13:24, 18 September 2023 (UTC)
Gawaon ( talk) 17:46, 20 September 2023 (UTC)The words sun, moon, solar system, and universe are not generally capitalized (India was the fifth nation to land on the moon; The solar system was formed 4.6 billion years ago), except when used in personifications (Sol Invictus ('Unconquered Sun') was the ancient Roman sun god). References to our planet are written as the earth (lowercase, with article) or Earth (capitalized, no article); if other planets are mentioned as well, the latter form is usually preferable (Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars are the four terrestrial planets). It is lowercased in colloquial expressions such as what on earth.
Comment This really isn't all that hard. The words Sun, Earth, Moon ... a specific celestial body in an astronomical context
. Astronomical sense means in the context of the science of astronomy - broadly construed. Trying to have it extend to more everyday uses could be construed as pettifogging.
Cinderella157 (
talk)
23:12, 19 September 2023 (UTC)
Just wondering in looking at this, are there times we don't capitalize Jupiter or Saturn? Granted I'm old, but I've used the phrase "jumpin' jupiter" many times. Is Jupiter always lower case in this context? I assumed it would be like cases of lower case sun and earth, but I've never seen it uncapitalized in that phrase. And sure I can see that we would spell it sunrise or sun-rise, but then when NASA talks about Titan and it's lakes and throws up a photo we see a picture of Saturn-rise over Titan? It does get confusing. Fyunck(click) ( talk) 23:06, 20 September 2023 (UTC)
Yep, this is not difficult at all. If you're referring to the daystar as an astronomical object, it's "the Sun". If you're employing a derived usage, as in "lying in the sun too long" (which really means "lying in the light produced by the Sun", not "going into the Sun and lying down"), then it's "the sun". "The Moon looked red because of dust particles in the Earth's atmosphere", but "The moon hits your eye / Like a big pizza pie" and "archaeologists digging in the peaty Scottish earth for months" (an astronomical body did not come down to Earth and hit someone; Scotland does not have its own separate planet). — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 04:34, 7 January 2024 (UTC)
You may be interested in a proposal on whether to capitalize the "Draft" in National Football League Draft, taking place at the village pump. (this is a copy of the duplicated notification posted to the project page Wikipedia talk:WikiProject National Football League. Dicklyon ( talk) 22:16, 6 January 2024 (UTC)
Please see Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style#"Acronyms in page titles" is mis-placed in an MoS page. In short, the material needs to move to a naming-conventions guideline, but which page? — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 15:19, 12 January 2024 (UTC)
It's been four years since the last RfC on this ended in no consensus, and seven years since the Associated Press stopped capitalizing it, prompting Wired to write an article headlined with " The AP Finally Realizes It's 2016, Will Let Us Stop Capitalizing 'Internet'". Is there appetite to try another RfC, or is this something more easily solved with a brief discussion on this page? Ed [talk] [OMT] 08:27, 2 December 2023 (UTC)
WP is not in a position to base its style decisions on vague notions about slow language change; we only do what the preponderance of recent reliable sources do. (This is why WP took several years to jump on the singular-they bandwagon, and was a decade behind the times in dropping commas from constructions like "John X. Smith, Jr."; we had to wait until the sourceable proof of a general shift in usage was incontrovertible.) Note here that even with "Nasa" being a human name or other word in various languages, "NASA" clearly dominates, as does "UNICEF" over "Unicef", despite multiple British and a few American news publishers preferring the "Unicef" weirdness. WP uses laser and radar and scuba and maser because these are the overwhelmingly dominant usage in sources, are written this way in almost all dictionaries, and the average person has no idea they even originated as acronyms. Assimilation of technical acronyms as non-acronym words happens fairly often, but virtually never happens with organizational names. The only almost-example I can think if is IKEA which is an acronym, but many people do not know that and fairly often write it as "Ikea" [4]. In the end, WP would be unlikely to switch to "Unicef" even if usage slid into a slight majority, until it became an overwhelming majority, because our general principle is to not make unusual stylistic exceptions unless independent sources are overwhelmingly consistent in preferring that specific exception for that specific case (see MOS:TM, etc.). — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 03:41, 2 January 2024 (UTC)
only words and phrases that are consistently capitalized in a substantial majority of independent, reliable sources are capitalized in Wikipedia. And that hasn't been true of "internet" for years. Popcornfud ( talk) 02:54, 2 January 2024 (UTC)
I said nothing remotely like "it's capitalized, because it's capitalized".
substantial majority, which has not existed for years now. (Edit: or, as you yourself say above, "we only do what the preponderance of recent reliable sources do").The fact that this majority no longer exists has even been written about in reliable sources. The "confusing magical exception" at this point is very much Wikipedia's. Popcornfud ( talk) 04:29, 2 January 2024 (UTC)
To get to the meat of the matter: Nothing about what I have presented is at all circular, and "whether to treat 'internet' as a proper noun is the entire question" is completely incorrect. Popcornfud is sorely confusing "proper name" AKA "proper noun" with "something that starts with a capital letter", and there simply is no such one-to-one correspondence. E.g. "ATM" is capitalized, for being an acronym/intialism conventionally presented that way (" scuba" and " laser" being acronyms that are not). This does not make "ATM" or its expansion " automated teller machine" a proper name. Meanwhile, " iPhone" and " tvOS" absolutely are proper names, but do not begin with capital letters (it's pure accident that they contain any at all); danah boyd is another (with none). The following is going to be quite long, because we have a lot catch-up ground to cover (though I just remembered this is covered in more detail at WP:Proper names and proper nouns).
See the article Proper noun: "A proper noun is a noun that identifies a single entity and is used to refer to that entity (Africa; Jupiter; Sarah; Tesla, Inc.) as distinguished from a common noun, which is a noun that refers to a class of entities (continent, planet, person, corporation) and may be used when referring to instances of a specific class (a continent, another planet, these persons, our corporation). "The Internet" by definition is a proper noun; "an internet" (AKA "an inter-network", "a WAN") is by definition a common noun. If you prefer the more esoteric approach of Proper name (philosophy) (which generally has no implications for WP titles and spelling, but we might as well cover it anyway): "a proper name – examples include a name of a specific person or place – is a name which ordinarily is taken to uniquely identify its referent in the world." Further, in direct reference theory (which now dominates in the philosophy of proper names) "the only meaning of a proper name is its referent". Even under this level of abstraction, "the Internet" is by definition a proper name and "an internet" cannot be one. (If you don't like our articles, see their sources and other reliable sources on the same matters; our articles are in fact summarizing them well.) There simply is no confusion about whether "the Internet" is a proper name except among people who do not actually understand what "proper name" AKA "proper noun" actually means. And it does not intrinsically have anything to do with capitalization; proper names exist in languages with writing systems that do not have letter case. People with no background in linguistics really should not try to get into linguistic arguments. This is often why MoS disputation is so recurrent, lengthy, and tedious. Everyone feels entitled to an opinion simply on the basis of being more or less fluent in the language, but they're usually operating on entirely subjective assumption, preference, and habit.
Where capitalization comes in is that English and most other languages with a cased writing system apply capitalization to proper names (though they do this differently in various ways, e.g. English usually capitalizes adjectival forms, like "European" from the noun form "Europe", while many other languages do not). What actually matters here is that Wikipedia has a MOS:PROPERNAME rule to apply capitalization to any proper name, and an exception to this (like any exception to any MoS rule) is made only when independent reliable sources nearly always make that exception for that specific case (thus tvOS, etc.). Near-universality of an exception for "the Internet", as "the internet" (same goes for "the web"), is already proven not to be the case. The lowercase version is simply an expediency preferred by some writers/publishers's house styles (mostly in news journalism and in business/PR writing derived from it). Lower-casing as "the internet" has the reader-confusing effect of implying that "the Internet" is not a proper name and that the Internet is not a singular thing with a proper name, but is instead a class of things with a generic common-noun, non-proper name like "the domestic cat" or "the airplane/aeroplane". The only difference between the argument to lowercase "the internet" and to lowercase "the pacific ocean" is that fortunately few lazy writers are going in the latter direction (though you can be sure that as soon as they do, there'll be a bunch of people demanding to lower-case it on Wikipedia; if you don't believe me, cf. previous attempts to lower-case the Western Hemisphere just because it can occasionally be found rendered "the western hemisphere" in some sources).
PS: "Are those guys [Microsoft, etc.] confused about how computers work, too?" Nothing in this discussion is related in any way to "how computers work"; reductio ad absurdum is silly and unproductive. Corporations follow "business communication" (a.k.a. "public relations") conventions, and these are almost entirely derived from journalistic style. (For example, if you get and read any US-published manual of business/PR style – as I have, e.g. The AMA Style Guide for Business Writing and several others – you'll almost always find it explicitly deferring to the AP Stylebook on any question not specifically addressed by the book in question, never to Chicago Manual of Style or other academic-leaning style guides that our MoS is actually based on).
In short, Microsoft is obviously a reliable source for how Windows, Excel, Skype, and Xbox operate, but is not a reliable source for how to write encyclopedic English, including about Microsoft and its products. This is covered in detail at WP:SSF. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 07:12, 6 January 2024 (UTC)
Change of heart: I've sat on this for some time, and (I'm sure this will irritate a couple of people above), I no longer feel comfortable making the case for the Internet. I think the fact that MOS:PN is set up as an exception to the lead principle of MOS:CAPS is a problem instead of a solution, and that it needs revision to be an explication of how that principle applies to proper names. MOS:PN as it stands now has been a source of frequent heated conflict, with people using OR and PoV subjective ideas about what "is" and "isn't" a proper name (using whichever definition of the notion suits their present purposes) to argue in "internet forum" style, sometimes for years, to try to get the result that they want in a particular topic. Outside of parochial conflicts of this sort, the project has actually had little difficulty with proper names (under several definitions) that conventionally are lower-cased in most independent sources, from personal names like k.d. lang and danah boyd to commercial trademarks like iPhone and tvOS. It's getting harder and harder to treat the internet and the web differently, when source usage has strongly shifted toward lower-case, except mostly in a few tech-sector publications. It's complicated further by the fact that "an internet" is now rather obsolescent usage, and "the web" doesn't have any other referent. Plus, both terms are usable in a generic, lower-case sense all the time anyway ("web development" and "internet technolgies" can and often do apply to intranets and such), with the result that non-expert editors would not be certain when the capitalization should apply. I have a particular revision in mind to propose for MOS:PN, but need to think hard on any secondary implications of it and redraft as needed to avoid issues. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 09:26, 19 January 2024 (UTC)
They used the term internet as a shorthand for internetwork in RFC 675. Another good example is in the History of the Internet article, here, where it says
In general, an internet was a collection of networks linked by a common protocol. In the time period when the ARPANET was connected to the newly formed NSFNET project in the late 1980s, the term was used as the name of the network, Internet, being the large and global TCP/IP network..
@ SomethingForDeletion: At this revert by SomethingForDeletion, the question is when to capitalize Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, in the context of a major field of study offered by a university. My thought was that we only cap when it's a full department names, as Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, but not in contexts like "... many of the same courses as the College of Engineering's Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS)". Normally, if someone has a degree in a subject (say physics), we say "BS in physics", not "BS in Physics"; is it different for a school offering a "BS in Physics"? I think the only thing I did wrong in this edit was to not also lowercase some other fields, such as Computer Science in a similar context. But what do others think? Dicklyon ( talk) 16:46, 17 July 2023 (UTC)
the College of Engineering's Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS). When we are talking about a specific institution's "Bachelor of X in Y", the Y is a major/program not an academic discipline (even when it happens to have the same name as an academic discipline), so title case is correct (indeed UCB's own website puts it in title case), whereas changing that to all lower case is making it less correct. SomethingForDeletion ( talk) 10:52, 20 July 2023 (UTC)
Computer Sciences), so it really doesn't coincide with the generic noun for the field [5]. XOR'easter ( talk) 19:44, 20 July 2023 (UTC)
Department of Computer Science (title). She majored in computer science (generic).Absolutely correct. -- Necrothesp ( talk) 15:17, 24 July 2023 (UTC)
The College of Letters and Science (L&S) also offers a Bachelor of Arts in Computer Science, which requires many of the same courses as the College of Engineering's Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), but has different admissions and graduation criteria.. In that sentence neither
Bachelor of Arts in Computer Sciencenor
Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering and Computer Scienceare generic. SomethingForDeletion ( talk) 08:36, 25 July 2023 (UTC)
The College of Letters and Science (L&S) also offers a bachelor of arts in computer science, which requires many of the same courses as the College of Engineering's bachelor of science in electrical engineering and computer science (EECS), but has different admissions and graduation criteria.What's wrong with that? It's just a bachelor of arts (level of degree) in computer science (subject of degree). It's not a proper name. -- Necrothesp ( talk) 15:25, 25 July 2023 (UTC)
majors/degrees/programs are specific abstract entities, and their names are proper nouns. XOR'easter ( talk) 19:06, 3 August 2023 (UTC)
Encyclopaedia Britannica website says (
"Are school subjects proper nouns or common nouns?"): School subjects are common nouns when used generally unless they are the name of a language. Names of specific classes or courses are proper nouns.
I agree with the editors of the Britannica here. So, as a subject/discipline, physics is lowercase. But in the name of a specific educational offering (course/class/unit/degree/program/major/etc), it is a proper noun and hence title case ("Physics" not "physics").
SomethingForDeletion (
talk)
02:11, 29 July 2023 (UTC)
The central issue here is that while "Bachelor of Science in Computer Science" is the correct name of the degree and program, "bachelor of science in computer science" is also correct as a generic description. And it is not always clear which is meant in a particular usage. -- User:Khajidha ( talk) ( contributions) 16:54, 6 August 2023 (UTC)
"... many of the same courses as the College of Engineering's Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS)". In that case, it is not clear if that is a named major or an area of study. It is capitalized and linked, but when clicked, it goes to the page Computer science and engineering which is not about the named program. I think it would be a surprise for a reader to click on what appears to be a proper name, then to go to the general page about the topic. It's not different in type from clicking on University of California and being redirected to University.I have been persuaded by the discussion above that sometimes the name of a field of study can also be a major/program/etc., and hence a proper name, but more often those words are capitalized for emphasis. If the sentence had been "... many of the same courses as the College of Engineering's Bachelor of Science Electrical Engineering and Computer Science program ..." it would not be ambiguous.As I think about it, I have probably, among the hundreds of times I have knocked down capitalization of majors or fields of study, knocked down specific programs when I shouldn't have. I will be more careful about that in the future and I will try to write better to make the difference between a specific program and an area of study (a proper name and a common noun) more clear. SchreiberBike | ⌨ 13:29, 7 August 2023 (UTC)
It is capitalized and linked, but when clicked, it goes to the page Computer science and engineering which is not about the named programPersonally, I have never thought of link targets as relevant to questions like capitalisation: if we look at the sentence in its context, and it is clear that in that sentence in that context, a particular noun phrase is a proper noun, and therefore deserves title case – I don't see why that judgement would be changed by the fact that someone has wikilinked the phrase to an article whose title is a common noun. We are never going to have articles for every proper noun, and so linking a proper noun to a common noun which names some concept of which that proper noun is an instance is not necessarily wrong, but I don't think doing so is a counterargument to the case that it is a proper noun in that particular sentence and context, nor do I think it even ought to make the matter ambiguous. SomethingForDeletion ( talk) 01:26, 14 August 2023 (UTC)
For a case that doesn't seem to fall quite on one side or the other, would you capitalize "Asian Theatre" in this case? — AjaxSmack 03:10, 25 September 2023 (UTC)
"The school offers Asian Theatre as a major and has ...". Based on that sentence, I can't tell if that is a named program or major or if it is a descriptive phrase. If instead of "Asian Theatre", it said "Chemistry", it would be equally ambiguous and I'd change it to lower case with little thought. It could be rewritten as "The school's Asian Theatre program has ..." and it would be clear that it is a proper noun. The university's main page on the program could use some copy editing, but generally refers to the field of study in lower case and the program in upper case. Further reading of the college's pages show that the major is in theater and the Asian subset is called either a concentration, focus area or a program, so it appears to be an error to call it a major. I hope that helps. SchreiberBike | ⌨ 12:49, 25 September 2023 (UTC)
Use lower case for all this stuff when possible. The entire problem with the idea 'I think "She has a PhD in mechanical engineering" is fine in a biography, although "PhD in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Woolloomooloo" would also be fine if that is the actual title of the degree/program she graduated with' is that it would require WP:OR with primary sources to try to prove that one way or another, and even if you found, say, a PDF of a degree certificate from a particular university, you have no evidence that it precisely matches the one issued to the bio subject, since the names of these things vary over time, and sometimes people do custom majors/minors (I did), but may summarize them in more conventional terms. And even if you could prove it with regard to that specific bio subject, the capital letter sprinkling is meaningless to the reader and inconsistent with treatment everywhere else in our materials. As for departments, it's fine but not necessarily ideal to refer to "the Department of Basketweaving at Fancy Pants University" if you have RS proof that the actual name of the department is (and was at the pertinent time) "the Department of Basketweaving" and not "the Basketweaving Department" or "the Faculty of Basketweaving" within the "the Department of Textile Arts" or "the X. Y. Zounds School of Basketweaving", or yadda yadda yadda. And this, too, is something that may have changed over time. Even if the name that pertained to the period can be proven to be "the Department of Basketweaving", this is really descriptive, and it would not be wrong to simply write it as "the department of basketweaving" anyway, switching to purely descriptive wording that happens to coincide by pure chance with what the actual name is. This would be more consistent with other usage when the exact names of other departments is unknown (which is most of the time), would not confuse anyone, and uses fewer uppercase letters that are not strictly required, which is the WP way. PS: Yes, use "a professor of basketweaving at Fancy Pants University" but "the X. Y. Zounds Distinguished Professor of Basketweaving at Fancy Pants University"; such endowments are proper-named awards. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 21:23, 21 January 2024 (UTC)
Wikipedia relies on sources to determine what is conventionally capitalized; only words and phrases that are consistently capitalized in a substantial majority of independent, reliable sources are capitalized in Wikipedia.This is based on a strong lower-casing trend, to avoid unnecessary capitalization, across all major English-language style guides, on which MoS is based. If you think that this should be changed to something like "Wikipedia relies on editors' collective sense of what should be capitalized, to suggest importance or significance, and Wikipedia capitalizes anything found capitalized in a substantial minority of sources, especially those that are closely tied to a subject" (and MOS:SIGCAPS and MOS:DOCTCAPS should be deleted), you know how to open an RfC; same goes for everyone else in this thread and every similar one. There is usually no solid sourcing cited for what the proper name of something like this is in a specific time slot; rather, editors just assume that "Department of Foo" or "Foo Department" is the proper name without checking. Highly sub-specific and even unique department names like "Department of Neurobiology and Behavior" and "Department of Traditional and Modern Philosophy", if actually verified with RS, would surely be something to capitalize; I don't think anyone would argue otherwise. But if sources say someone is/was in the psychology department of some university, that shouldn't be capitalized without verifying it's the actual department name (or was at the relevant time period) and not just a descriptive label. Even if it was, what exact benefit is there to capitalizing it when it's that generic? What important fact is being signalled to the reader by "in the Department of Physics at Foobar University" that is not by "in the department of physics at Foobar University" or "in Foobar University's physics department" in someone's bio? Why would the reader care? And, to address other capitalization desires in this thread, why on earth would we ever write "the university's Physics department"? — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 17:18, 25 January 2024 (UTC)
MOS:LISTCAPS doesn't specify if capitalization applies to the entire table, or can change on a column-by-column basis. I.e. which takes precedence: Wikipedia avoids unnecessary capitalization.
– the very first sentence of the MOS – or If the list items are sentence fragments, then capitalization should be consistent – sentence case should be applied to either all or none of the items.
? The particular instance is a table than contains fleet numbers (a mixed number-letter string), dates, status (a single word), and notes (the last being in full sentence case).
Useddenim (
talk)
14:44, 14 February 2024 (UTC)