A fact from Straight dance appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know column on 6 February 2013 (check views). The text of the entry was as follows:
Did you know... that the Native AmericanStraight dance(pictured) recounts the stories of war parties searching for the enemy?
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There's some inconsistency in this article between "Straight Dance" and "Straight dance". Which should it be? Does this article need to be moved to "Straight Dance"? George Ponderevo (talk) 00:43, 6 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I made it (and Grass dance) lower case to be consistent with Fancy dance. However most sources have them all capitalized (Straight Dance, Fancy Dance, Grass Dance, etc). I'd support moving the article, but we should make the other articles consistent. It looks like Gourd Dance and Native American Hoop Dance both have "dance" capitalized. Deflagro (talk) 02:21, 6 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]
It seems obvious to me that the article should be titled "Straight Dance", but then many things are obvious to me that take others some time to work out. ;-) What other articles do is neither here nor there. George Ponderevo (talk) 02:38, 6 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]
That's not quite true here. The term "Fancy dance" refers not to a single dance but is an umbrella term for a number of separate dances, of which the "straight dance" is one. All the dances that are fancy dances should follow the same naming convention - whether upper case or lower case. I think if Fance dance is lower case, then probably this should be too. Or, all the dances should be moved to upper case and made consistent as Deflagro says. Truthkeeper (talk) 02:47, 6 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I've never heard of Fancy Dance being an umbrella term, but instead to describe a specific dance. Are you referring to all competitive pow wow styles as Fancy dances? Maybe this discussion should be moved to the WP:IPNA wikiproject since we're talking about several different articles. Deflagro (talk) 02:53, 6 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Well I could be wrong. That's what I thought though - that a specifically named dance can also be a fancy dance. Unfortunately, I don't really know enough about it - I've been to a few pow wows and watched, but that's honestly the extent of my knowledge. Sorry, shouldn't have butted in. I do like this article though - nice pictures too. Truthkeeper (talk) 03:00, 6 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I'm definitely not an expert so I might be mistaken! I posted at the WikiProject. It seems most of the dance articles have the title not capitalized but capitalize throughout the article. If we decide to capitalize, we should probably wait a day so there's not a redirect on the front page. Deflagro (talk) 03:15, 6 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Wikiproject participant weighing in. I'd say that we have two things going on here. One is consistency with the general guidelines of WP:MOS, which prefers "sentence case" (Straight dance) for titles. While there is an argument for title case, the problem is that most of the rest of the real world uses title case, but WP does not unless there is some real specific reason to do so (like someone's name, for example). (See WP:TITLES). The second argument is internal consistency within the article, which is critical. I say make it all one way and if the wikigods decree it to go the other way, then it's easily fixed with a find and replace. I personally have adopted a policy of trying to avoid capitalization issues altogether, as they seem to result in ridiculous edit wars and people quitting in disgust (there was a huge battle over whether to use The/the Beatles in the article body text a while back, was endless). As for "fancy dance," I know that the northern pow wows have men's and women's divisions, as does the Northern Traditional, but the Grass D/dance and Jingle D/dress competitions are sex-specific. Not sure on Southern Straight... My take is that the wiki MOS gods will kick less if we keep them all in sentence case. But I also refuse to get drawn into this one, other than to say that once consensus is reached, all article should be fixed to reflect it. AND -- if you need to put in move requests to fix any of them, be prepared to renegotiate consensus all over again with a bunch of people who have no clue as to the previous discussion. (Having the shakes and twitches from having just settled one of these regarding 350 horse breed articles). This gives me PTSD just thinking about it! Montanabw(talk) 19:36, 6 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]
