Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Capital letters

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There are exceptions for specific cases discussed below, such as common names of fauna.

Internet/internet

AWB has started capitalising "internet" to "Internet", e.g. here. According to Internet capitalization conventions, many publications are now using the common noun (uncapitalised) form. Does Wikipedia have any conventions about this? —  Tivedshambo  (t/c) 21:31, 17 December 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I don't think so, but I would prefer the "internet" - case. Maybe we should start a pool. mabdul 21:16, 25 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I prefer to treat it as a proper noun. It is a specific net. You can think of SIPRNET, but I guess you can get me with that is an abbreviation, and military at that. but I think even written out, it gets the capitals. I think that is more common on traditional print sources, and that given our work product is closer to conventional writing than a computer hobbyist site, think we are better off going with the more traditional slant. But you can look it up and there is different usage, so you can decide if you want to be more safe or more out there. And of course you can look at all the similar issues with world and earth and universe and "the seas" and the like.  ;-) TCO (talk) 21:33, 25 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I do think this is comparable to the "universe". The fact that something is uniquely identifiable doesn't qualify it as a proper name. Because the internet is a descriptive term, and it has social connotations which are not proper names, I prefer the "internet". When in doubt, do not capitalize. Inarius (talk) 16:52, 25 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Celestial bodies

This example from the current version of the article:

"The Moon orbits the Earth"

Is contrary to the guidance here:

http://www.wwu.edu/journalism/syllabi/207labmanual.htm
ASSOCIATED PRESS STYLE ESSENTIALS
The sun warms the earth.

My recollection from school was to capitalize "Sun," "Earth," and "Moon" only when not preceded by the definite article.

Similar:

http://www.myenglishteacher.net/captilizingletters.html
Titles of people are only capitalized when they are followed by someone’s name.
Example: That is the president of the United States.

The definite article "the" already makes it clear that a unique object/person is the subject. Capitalization in these cases make the definite article redundant. - Ac44ck (talk) 17:18, 16 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

This is an old comment, but I'll respond anyway: To me, the sun warms the earth means "the sunlight warms the dirt". If you're talking about the celestial bodies, those are proper nouns and should be capitalized. The words sun, moon, and earth all have meanings as common nouns ("sunlight" or occasionally "star", "natural satellite", and "dirt", respectively), and those do not take capitals except e.g. as the first word of a sentence. --Trovatore (talk) 05:51, 26 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Titles of people

I need some clarification on the "part of the name" thing. It says that "President Nixon" goes with capital, but can you give an example with a full sentence? Does it apply to any case when "president" goes before the name, as in "...the treaty was signed by US president Nixon, fooian president Foohnson...", or is there a more specific rule? Cambalachero (talk) 00:36, 20 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Not sure, but the best would be to rephrase the sentence, saying "...the treaty was signed by President Nixon of the US and President Foohnson of Foo..." to avoid the potential for incorrectness and well-meaning-but-incorrect corrections where the capital is switched. oknazevad (talk) 20:45, 20 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I think I got it. Being "part of the name" means that both words (title and name) are used as a single noun? Cambalachero (talk) 21:22, 20 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Can we re-visit this part of the guideline. I've just changed all the Kings in George II of Great Britain to kings, but when I started doing the same for the Queens in Anne, Queen of Great Britain, it just didn't look right. Elizabeth II is always called "the Queen" not "the queen". These websites say capitalise for high offices, capitalise when used specifically as opposed to generically, capitalise when they refer to a specific and obvious person, capitalise when referring to definite persons, capitalise when very high ranking, capitalise for very important titles, and capitalize a title referring to a specific person and used as a substitute for that person's name. I do appreciate that there are others saying never capitalise: [1][2]. It seems to me that this is essentially a personal choice, but if we decide that Elizabeth II will always be "the queen", I think we could find the MoS is not in line with actual practice. DrKiernan (talk) 18:10, 26 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Looking at a recent edit spat, this seems to be a vexed question here. In Federal government of the United States#Executive branch, "the President" is used throughout, even when not referring to the full title or to a specific person. In looking at normal English usage, it seems to be "presidential", or "the presidency" or "a president" and "the President". Wikipedia seems a little out of step here, and inconsistent in usage. Perhaps it should be that in an article dealing with a specific person or office, the term "Queen" or "President" or "Governor-General" is seen as referring to the full title, which is always capitalised. --Pete (talk) 04:41, 16 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

(Non-)Capitalization of German loanwords

Shouldn't this rule (from List of German expressions in English) be included somewhere on this page?

German common nouns adopted into English are in general not initially capitalised, and the ß is generally changed to ss.

Art Carlson (talk) 07:43, 11 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Governments

This doesn't seem to be covered. I can appreciate that "state" has no cap generally. But what about the "state of Florida" or (repeating the title of an article) "The Government of the State of Florida" or "The 'government of the state of Florida." It seems to me that "State of Florida" is a formal term, like "Commonwealth of Virginia". Maybe not government, but it was in the title. Which may be next by the editor-fixer, BTW. :) Student7 (talk) 18:35, 14 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, the full, formal name should be capitalized when it's being used not to identify the location, but the governing body as a corporate entity. For example, The plain "Chicago" can and should be used when simply discussing the city in general, but "City of Chicago" should be used when discussing the city government (in the American sense) as a whole. The construct "city of Chicago" shouldn't be used, as the plain "Chicago" is sufficient for general discussion, and the corporate governing entity specifically is a proper noun that includes the capitalized "City". (Of course, New York City, and other such places that typically include "City", "Borough", "Township" , etc to disambiguate from some other location are a special case. "New York City" refers to the city in general, while "City of New York" is for the city government corporate.) oknazevad (talk) 02:09, 15 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Stylized (non-acronym) ALLCAPS in tables/lists

In a table of songs with bands that perform them, we have some bands like KMFDM or HIM which are acronym alongside bands like Kiss (band) where they normally use "KISS" even though this is not an acronym. This makes the Kiss entry look funny particularly for anyone that knows the band. I understand the intent and logic behind ALLCAPS for prose sections, but in table entries where the allcaps word is by itself or minimal other prose around it, it would seem that, if it improves the looks, to use the allcaps stylistic version in contrast to the prose-friendly version. Any input on this aspect? --MASEM (t) 00:18, 18 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I don't think the fact that it's a table matters in the slightest, and that bands with actual acronyms or initialisms appear alongside doesn't make it matter more. It looks weird because it's often spelled in all caps, but a quick Google search of "the band kiss" shows that Wikipedia isn't the only place where the lowercase version lives, so I don't think we need to make a Kiss or band-name exception. -Rrius (talk) 00:46, 18 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Capitalization of "white" (or "White")

Is it "white" or "White" when discussing European-Americans in discussion and presentation of US census data. The US Census tables capitalize the term, along with "Black" and the "n" in "Native American" and "i" in "Pacific Islander" (see, e.g., [3]). When the 2000 US census data were imported into Wikipedia, way long time ago, the presentation always capitalized the "w", "n", "i" in White, Native American, and Pacific Islander. See, e.g., Peoria,_Illinois#Demographics ("Black" was not used). Throughout our article on White American, "White" is capitalized throughout. Recently, another editor protested that my use of capitalization of "White" was not appropriate. What say us - is it OK? If not, do we send a bot to correct the literally hundreds of thousands of capitalized "White"s, "Native"s, "Black"s, "Islander"s? Carlossuarez46 (talk) 20:14, 2 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]

RFC: restructuring of the Manual of Style

Editors may be interested in this RFC, along with the discussion of its implementation:

Should all subsidiary pages of the Manual of Style be made subpages_of WP:MOS?

It's big; and it promises huge improvements. Great if everyone can be involved. NoeticaTea? 00:28, 25 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Capitalization of "short" vs. "long" prepositions

Sorry, gang, but I have to take issue with a hard-and-fast rule that would say that four-letter prepositions get decapitalized but five-letter prepositions are capitalized. This leads to all sorts of anomalies, such as "over" being lowercased but its companion "Under" not, potentially in the same title, or titles with established orthographies (One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest being a good example) being recapitalized just for Wikipedia. Without some flexibility, what we have here is a k.d. lang problem. I seem to remember a time when the article for her was stubbornly enforced to be set to "K.D. Lang" despite the fact that she was not known by that orthography anywhere--rules were rules, after all. Except, there is no reason for a rule so stringent as a 4-letter/5-letter preposition rule. What is the source for such a rule? Where else is it obeyed? Robert K S (talk) 12:57, 1 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]

In general, "over" is not capitalized in the middle of a title unless you capitalize all words in the title. Just because you can show one title of a work where the rule seems often to be ignored, that doesn't mean the rule doesn't exist. Your proposed wording replaces a clear rule, which can be ignored like all WP guidelines, with one that means absolutely nothing. Better than pulling "over" out of the list and neutering the 5-word rule would be to find a way to work "generally" or "usually" into the wording. -Rrius (talk) 13:18, 1 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]
It's not one example. I can name examples until I'm out of breath. I'll Never Get Over You Getting Over Me. Reign Over Me. Moon Over Parma. Get Over It (many songs, film, etc.) Bridge Over Troubled Water. Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer. I'll Never Get Over You Getting Over Me (double whammy there). The question is, where is this rule supposedly from? It's not followed uniformly on Wikipedia, and it seems to be a minority rule in every other source. It's contingent upon those who want to institute the rule and see it followed to show that it ought to be, for good reason, when other sources--I dare say the majority of sources--go flatly against it. By the way, in all of the above examples, I'm not relying on the Wikipedia pages to show that the word "over" shouldn't be capitalized. Search on the Internet. Look at IMDb. Find the original album covers. Look for references to the titles in the print media. Overwhelmingly, "Over" is capitalized. Robert K S (talk) 15:08, 1 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Capitalization of words with elided letters in titles

Which would be the correct article title: Get 'em Girls (song) or Get 'Em Girls (song)? This was recently brought up for an uncontroversial requested move here with the rationale being "caps". If the word "them" had been spelled out in the title, it would have been capitalized. But I think it looks odd to capitalize the remainder of the word with elided initial letters. Such elisions are not uncommon in popular music titles. Perhaps another bullet could be added under Wikipedia:Manual of Style (capital letters)#Composition titles to clarify this. older ≠ wiser 12:11, 4 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Addendum. The examples below show a tendency to capitalize the elision, so I may have been mistaken in thinking the elided word shouldn't be capitalized. There does nonetheless appear to be some inconsistency in the titles. Perhaps the rule should be to reflect a) how the work it titled by the authors/distributors and b) how reliable media present the title. Note: Not all the following are musical compositions, but all are titled works. older ≠ wiser 16:14, 4 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Upper case
Lower case

A side observation, where the elision is presented without any leading space between the remainder and the preceding word, the tendency is to not capitalize.

Suggested addition

Seasons I see things like, "Cranston returned for Season 4 of Breaking Bad..." all the time. For some reason, editors think that "season" is capitalized when it refers to a season of a television program. As far as I'm aware, this is not standard English in any style manual and I think it would be wise to add something about that to this article. For what it's worth, I always see it paired with a numeral (e.g. "4") rather than a spelled-out word ("four") with this capital-S construction. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 02:30, 5 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I agree that this guideline should explicitly caution editors against the capitalised spelling of "season" and "episode". Should similar advice regarding the use of "act" and "scene" in plays and operas be included?
As for numerals: I think that strictly following WP:ORDINAL might often look awkward and pedantic; consider "after declining viewer numbers in season nine, season 10 was to be the last." -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 05:12, 5 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I'm not sure I agree with this. I feel like there's a generally tendency when given the construction of a noun followed by a cardinal number to capitalize the noun and use the numeral. For example, Act 1 is the first act, Chair 21 is the twenty-first chair, Person 3 is the third person. The way I see it, it's acting like a proper noun with "Season 1" being the name of the first season, etc. Additionally, I don't know what other style guides say, but a quick google search of the NYTimes[4][5][6] and the LATimes[7][8][9] websites (not including blogs), appears to show that they tend to capitalize in these situations. -- Irn (talk) 11:25, 5 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Is this the last word? Anything followed by a number should be capitalised? Or, less far-reaching: "season", "act", "scene" followed by a number should be capitalised? -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 11:39, 19 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I don't think it should be. There is surely a distinction to be made between a style and a proper name. "The fourth episode of Foosoap..." is fine. "The 4th Episode of Foosoap..." is absurd. Use of "....Season 4 of Foosoap..." should depend on an RS (as opposed to some other organisation's style guide) using it, otherwise it should be "....season 4..." or more likely "... season four...". The distinction between 'numeral (e.g. "4") rather than a spelled-out word ("four")' referred to above suggests this is style-based and I can't see any reason to follow it unless it becomes a standard international convention. Ben MacDui 12:15, 19 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]
So far as I know this is pretty standard. As a mathematician, I am used to this kind of style from our technical writing. For example: "Using Zorn's Lemma we can show that. ... It follows from the main theorem of the last section that Proposition 5 can be strengthened as follows: ..." I am pretty sure that professional style guides such as the Chicago Manual of Style also prescribe this style, if only someone with access could look it up for us. Since it is a matter of style, we should definitely not make it dependent on what the sources do. Tea-leaf reading from sources has nothing to do with verifiability, it's just laziness. The only exception would be if high-quality sources in a specific field (or a specific variant of English) were consistently using a non-standard style. Hans Adler 12:30, 19 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]
You are alluding to one of my concerns about this - WP:ENGVAR. It may be that there are few international differences but instruction creep of this kind isn't helpful if there are. Also, "tea-leaf reading from sources has nothing to do with verifiability" - how true, but then this discussion has nothing much to do with verifiability either. Unless I misunderstand it is a suggestion that we have a consistent style regardless of source usage. I am not sure why you choose the rather ad hominen word "laziness". Ben MacDui 14:12, 19 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Sorry, but I responded to how I understood "Use of '....Season 4 of Foosoap...' should depend on an RS (as opposed to some other organisation's style guide) using it". It sounded as if your were proposing that (hypothetical examples, so no need to prove me wrong in these cases as I am no doubt wrong) if most sources about The Kingdom (TV miniseries) were written by non-native speakers of English who for some reason (incorrectly, in my opinion) wrote "season 1" and "season 2" instead of "Season 1" and "Season 2", whereas for practically all other series the word is capitalised in this context, then we should also use this eccentric capitalisation in our article. If that's not what you meant, then I apologise. Maybe you can clarify what you did mean. But over the last year or so I have seen an increasing trend for people to propose precisely this kind of tealeaf-reading from sources in order to undermine the MOS, or the common sense (and previously uncontroversial) practice of doing in Wikipedia what encyclopedias do, even if all the sources are not encyclopedias and therefore do things differently. And when you challenge them on this, most of them claim that this is what is required by WP:V. I hope you will agree that this just doesn't make sense. By saying this is just laziness I reduced the reasons behind this behaviour to just one dimension. Of course there are several others, but I think it's really mostly lazy thinking that makes editors identify style issues as nails just because they haven't returned the hammer of verifiability to the toolbox after their last handicraft work. Hans Adler 17:00, 19 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for this reply. What I meant about " Use of '....Season 4 of Foosoap...' " was that if it is clear that the originators of the work and coverage by native speakers of English in the country of origin also uses this form, than that's fine. Thus "CS Miami, Season 8" would, assuming it meets those criteria, be the appropriate form. However "Taggart, Season 27" would not be as the producers uses "series", not "season" and (at least some) reviewers don't capitalise the "s". A review in a Zimbabwean newspaper would not carry the weight of the "local" reviewers. I hope that's a more useful description - and apologies for not making this more so above. Making every one use caps because that is standard practice in the US/India/Zimbabwe or wherever isn't something I'd support. Ben MacDui 10:13, 20 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Languages

Hello,

I propose adding a section detailing the capitalization of languages. It would include the following guidelines:

  • Language names (such as English or Spanish) should always be capitalized, even when used as adjectives ("English literature", for example).
  • Adjectives such as "ancient" should be capitalized when used as part of the name of a language. For example, "Ancient Greek". Note that this not apply when referring to "ancient Greek food", for example, because this refers to the period, not the language. If you want to refer to literature written in Ancient Greek, use "Ancient Greek literature", but if you want to refer to literature written in the ancient Greek period, use "ancient Greek literature".

I can't think of any more at the moment. Any ideas? InverseHypercube 23:25, 11 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]

The last is a good example. It's simply the distinction between proper and common noun, of course, but it might be useful to spell it out. Have you had trouble with this from other editors? — kwami (talk) 18:38, 22 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, I've seen this mistake quite often, usually using the proper form "Ancient" incorrectly, such as in "Ancient Greek civilization". Also, I was not sure before doing some research whether "ancient" had to be capitalized when referring to languages, because "ancient Greek" could refer to the ancient form of the Greek language, instead of being a language in and of itself. It seems convention dictates that it should be capitalized. InverseHypercube 19:02, 22 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]
If it's merely descriptive—just some ancient form of Greek—then it should not be capitalized. But if it's the stage of the language encoded in ISO etc. as "Ancient Greek", proper noun phrase, then it should. But it's probably a bad idea to rely on capitalization alone to dab those two meanings.
English is easier: I doubt many people use the common adjective "old" to describe the language, so (AFAIK) it should only be "Old English". The diff in caps is more important at the other end: "modern English" is a rather different animal than "Modern English". — kwami (talk) 12:07, 24 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]

god/God

We're having a dispute over the proper capitalization of "god" in a passage, and one of the confounding factors is the MoS. We say, In a biblical context "God" is always capitalized when referring to the Judeo-Christian deity, but not capitalized when referring to anyone else to whom the word "god" is applied.

That's good as a rule of thumb, but not quite true. It actually can be conflated with the preceding rule, Proper nouns and titles referencing deities are capitalized, because the same rule applies: Besides use in titles, capitalization indicates that the god is supreme.

That's true in the Biblical context as well, at least in the NIV. So foreigners repeatedly say "the god of Israel", lower case, because they do not see him as supreme. But when the King of Babylon is convinced, he says, ""Surely your God is the God of gods and the Lord of kings"—lord gets the same treatment. Or, in a contest between religions, Then you call on the name of your god, and I will call on the name of Jehovah ["the LORD"]. The god who answers by fire—he is God. That is, the capitalization is a recognition of which god is supreme, not an indication of Jehovah. (Though of course Jehovah turns out to be God. There is no god/God difference in Hebrew; all instances are elohim.) We even get small-g 'god' for Jehovah in his own words, given the proper context: The man of God came up and told the king of Israel, "This is what Jehovah says: 'Because the Arameans think Jehovah is a god of the hills and not a god of the valleys, I will deliver this vast army into your hands, and you will know that I am Jehovah.'"

Abolutist adherence to what is supposed to be a guideline is the real problem, of course. But people tend to do that. I think it would be a good idea to give at least an idea of how capitalization has semantic impact, and isn't simply anaphora for Jehovah. — kwami (talk) 18:33, 22 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I think we should be very wary of adopting the capitalization conventions of any single translation of the Bible, as each translation reflects the outlook of its translators, in terms of language choice and complexity, theology, and intended audience. It's the sort of NPOV convention based on a wide variety of sources we should use. oknazevad (talk) 01:54, 24 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]
We specifically say we don't capitalize "Him", even though it is capitalized in most Bibles. It seems to me that we're trying for plain English here, so as not to push a particular theology. Not capitalizing nouns unless they're being used as proper nouns (names, titles, etc.) is part of normal English punctuation. — kwami (talk) 11:20, 24 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I am Catholic. I would hope that we can, for otherwise non-controversial topics involving different biblical translations, adopt the King James Version as the basis for most quotes in this English version of Wikipedia. This would presumably include capitalization.
While we are at it, I hate to be referred, when I am in a hurry, to a list of bibleverses containing a selection of translations, starting off with the Aarvdark version, and proceeding through dozens, if not hundreds of other versions that I never heard of. That is not helpful IMO. Point to KJV and be done with it! Don't make a double indirect pointer out of a reference! Thanks. Student7 (talk) 11:49, 26 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]
The problem with the King James is that the language is out-dated; however, it does seem a simple standard to adopt. Perhaps we could use the King James with any spelling and capitalisation modernised? McLerristarr | Mclay1 07:12, 27 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Stylistic all caps

I would like to know why it is now acceptable for articles about individuals who "like their name in all lowercase" to be stylized as such (k.d. lang and will.i.am), but individuals who like their names in all caps is still not accepted? Also, are band names acceptable to be in all lowercase too? Xfansd (talk) 22:34, 6 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Discussion at village pump concerning capitalization of technical terms

There is a discussion of whether and when to capitalize technical terms at the Village pump. We lack guidelines for determining what is a proper name and what is not in this context. I encourage participation from those involved in developing these MOS guidelines. Jojalozzo 03:16, 15 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Clarification of science and math naming guideline

I attempted to clarify the guideline for names of ideas in science and math. This guideline could apply to engineering as well (where full capitalization of names for ideas is standard practice) but I'm awaiting the results of ongoing discussion. Jojalozzo 16:07, 15 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Similar issues arise in chess where Gambit, Game, Mate, Opening, Countergambit are often capitalized in the names of specific moves (e.g. see Category:Chess openings). Is this a different case from Extreme Programming or Program Evaluation and Review Technique? If so, how? Jojalozzo 19:33, 15 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Where is this ongoing discussion? It seems to me that the problem is not related to science, engineering, chess, or any particular field, but to the wide tendency of people in a field to capitalize to make their own stuff more prominent, or proper-like. I've been seeing the same at dog breeds, for example; most guides that comment say to only capitalize the proper name parts, but all the dog breed articles in WP all seem to use title case. We should make a more broad and clear guideline about this, I think. Dicklyon (talk) 16:53, 21 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Oh, found it. You linked it above, thanks. Dicklyon (talk) 16:59, 21 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Individuals' names

There is a clause on this page that allows for the non-capitalization of individuals' names. Why do we not treat individuals who have their names (or stage names) entirely capitalized or partially capitalized with the same clause? I am only really aware of the existence of this practice when it comes to musicians and celebrities in the Japanese sphere, we surely should not have this double standard set in place, because in the majority of reliable sources, their names are parsed in all capital letters.—Ryūlóng (竜龙) 18:19, 22 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]

  • Comment. Essentially, the rationale for the refrain from writing in all caps correlates to psychological factors and the Chicago Manual of Style. Since this is the English Wikipedia, we use English grammar and style guidelines, along with generally accepted standards to maintain readability. The standards and guidelines are consistent throughout Wikipedia and not exclusive to Japanese musicians and celebrities. From a left brain/right brain perspective, studies have shown that writing in all caps hinders the readability, i.e., comprehension, speed, ease, and flow of the text for readers. Capital letters have no ascenders or descenders, which help us recognize word shapes, instead of needing to identify each individual letter. De/ascenders permit reading by word units, while all capitals tend to be read letter by letter. Use of de/ascenders greatly improves comprehension and flow for the reader. Hope this helps. Cind.amuse (Cindy) 23:24, 22 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]
    But if it how the individual refers to himself or herself, why should we be required to change it?—Ryūlóng (竜龙) 23:27, 22 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]
    On capitalized letters and readability, you might find this article interesting: [10] Cooldra01 (talk) 14:02, 23 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]
    • (edit conflict)This also is a BLP and NPOV issue though. Especially for indivisuals, we also strive to be as neutral as possible, something more important than astetics. If they and other sources use an all caps name, imo WP:BLP and WP:NPOV should come into play else we should not allow any exceptions. Otherwise we are not being neutral; we are saying those who use lowercase or CamelCase can be represented how they want, but those who use all UPPERCASE cannot.陣内Jinnai 23:29, 22 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]
      • I agree. I believe all names (especially but not limited to BLPs, and regardless of national origin) should be presented according to their verifiable use in reliable sources, preferably third party sources. That's the standard for everything else in Wikipedia and it is a double standard for all caps names to be treated differently, especially now that other "artistic choice" typesettings like no caps and camel case are allowed. From a truly neutral point of view, whether or not an all caps name is harder to read is not relevant: if that is how the name of the individual (or title of a work, etc.) is most widely presented in verifiable sources, then that is the version that must be used. Furthermore, given that with names we are talking about, at most, a few words being presented in all caps - not whole sentences or paragraphs - I do not think that readability would be meaningfully compromised anyway. Ibanez100 (talk) 01:41, 23 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]
      • Agree. If verifiable and reliable third-party sources consistently refer to an individual as an all-caps, non-caps or whatnot, that name should be used. It is not our place to alter an individual's name for the sake of aesthetics. Cooldra01 (talk) 14:02, 23 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]
      • This is really interesting for me. As someone who strongly supported making the change regarding the lower case names a few years ago, I now find myself reacting negatively to this idea on aesthetic grounds because, frankly, I don't like it, which is, of course, not a valid argument. This does strike me as a WP:BLP issue and is logically consistent with the change made for lower case names. So I support it as well. -- Irn (talk) 14:30, 23 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]

A move request has been started at my first attempt to ignore the rules, found at DJ OZMA. If every source calls him "DJ OZMA", why should Wikipedia have it as "DJ Ozma"? And why can't Kabachan be at KABA.chan, etc.—Ryūlóng (竜龙) 00:06, 23 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]

It's hardly universal. See DJ Ozma at [11], [12], [13], [14], [15], and others. Do we have an example of name that is more universally all caps? Dicklyon (talk) 16:45, 23 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I agree that if most independent sources use unusual capitalization of a person's name, when written in the latin alphabet, the English Wikipedia should too. However, sometimes family names are written in all caps to identify it as the family name, in contexts where some people write their family name first and others write family name last. In that situation, the English Wikipedia should use normal capitalization. Jc3s5h (talk) 17:33, 23 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I agree, and that would be a good point to address in the rules if all caps names become explicitly accepted. In my opinion, the only exception to what you said would be if there is a verifiable and established all caps Romanization of the person's name. However in the vast majority of cases, like you said, the Romanized family name should not be in all caps as that kind of capitalization is something which is done more or less out of convenience than out of any kind of verifiability. Ibanez100 (talk) 19:09, 23 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]
@Dickylon: It's still the subject's preference to write his name as "DJ OZMA", as much as it's Ms. Lang's preference to write her name as "k.d. lang".—Ryūlóng (竜龙) 19:08, 23 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I'm not denying that, but I don't think it's very relevant. Evidence suggests that reliable sources ignore that kind of odd preference, and use normal style instead, as we do, and as we do with odd trademarks and such. Dicklyon (talk) 19:12, 23 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]
It's not true that reliable sources ignore nonstandard capitalization of individuals' names. Pick up any reliable Japanese music magazine and you will see numerous individuals' names presented in all caps, no caps, unusual punctuation, and the like. The musician hide (alternately or formerly known as HIDE) is an excellent example of no caps and also an example of all caps. For an English language example, see will.i.am or k.d. lang. Ibanez100 (talk) 19:42, 23 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I only claim that some reliable sources ignore funny styling. We can, too. Dicklyon (talk) 19:59, 23 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Taking this away from the specific DJ OZMA example for a moment: if "some" reliable sources say (for example) Fred, while most reliable sources say FRED, how is it in the best interest of verifiability, neutrality, and other BLP principles to present the less verifiable version in the article? That seems to me like cherrypicking sources to support a personal preference. Ibanez100 (talk) 20:24, 23 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Not only that, but if the majority used fred we'd not have any issue. That seems like a double-standard.陣内Jinnai 20:55, 23 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, it seems fair to call it a double standard, if that makes you more comfortable with it. Dicklyon (talk) 20:59, 23 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Well the best defense of it so far has been "all caps ins't ascetically pleasing" which is probably the least important criteria. Even if the studies are true, there are plenty of other things that aren't (such as black text on a white screen) that we none-the-less don't do. I'm not saying we go exclusively with what the person says, but rather we simply apply the same measures we apply to other non-standard capitalization.陣内Jinnai 21:21, 23 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]
So, simply because 5% of reliable, regularly updated and frequently visited sources use DJ OZMA in non-caps means we have the excuse to use it as such, and we will definitely exploit that excuse? And if you already know it's a double standard, you still feel no inclination to change it? I think you just don't like it. Cooldra01 (talk) 08:56, 24 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Well, yes, but that's just me. I see no big issue in our different standards for lower-casing and upper-casing names. Maybe someone else has an opinion, too? Dicklyon (talk) 06:59, 25 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]
The top of this page says: "This page falls within the scope of WikiProject Manual of Style, a drive to identify and address contradictions and redundancies, improve language, and coordinate the pages that form the MoS guidelines." Everyone is certainly welcome to their opinion and it's fine if you don't personally mind the different standards, but the purpose of this talk page is to find and deal with such things. Ibanez100 (talk) 19:24, 25 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]

(undent) I think this issue is unusually cut and dry: Wikipedia only uses all caps for acronyms and initialisms, and "DJ OZMA" is neither, so his name should be written on Wikipedia as "DJ Ozma". I simply don't see a pressing need to change this: WP already rewrites trademarks of companies and products for legibility and easy searching (Macy's, Skate, Yellow Tail, Seven, Alien 3, Toys "R" Us...), and a person's stage name isn't really too different from a product's brand or trademark.

I also think it's fallacious to argue that a Japanese stage name suddenly becomes a definitive English name just because it happens to be written in romaji. We convert the name of Japanese artist 浜崎あゆみ into Ayumi Hamasaki, even though the former is her most common name, and in the same vein I don't have a problem with converting the name of Japanese artist DJ OZMA into DJ Ozma. Jpatokal (talk) 02:11, 26 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]

浜崎あゆみ and DJ OZMA are two entirely different cases. The first is a name in Japanese characters and therefore must be rendered in Latin characters (romanized) to be legible in English. The result, "Ayumi Hamasaki", is romaji: a Latin alphabet rendition of a Japanese language word or name. "DJ OZMA" is not romaji, because it is not a transliteration of a name that was originally in Japanese. Since it is already in Latin characters, further conversion is not needed: altering it to DJ Ozma is no different than altering k.d. lang to K.D. Lang or will.i.am to William, both of which are no longer considered acceptable on Wikipedia. Altering some Latin alphabet stage names but not others is a clear double standard. Why should a Latin alphabet stage name be altered simply because the man who uses it is Japanese? Ibanez100 (talk) 06:23, 26 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]
1) DJ OZMA's legal name is Ozumano Sumitada (尾妻野 純直), so yes, it actually is a (partial) transliteration. Whether the chicken came before the egg is another question ;)
2) But that's actually irrelevant. The point is that romaji (Latin characters) do not make the name English, any more than BOOK OFF becomes English when written with romaji instead of as ブックオフ. And guess what? The company's article is at Book Off, with normal caps, even though the company always uses all caps for it.
3) Last but not least, being Japanese has nothing to do with it; DJ OZMA should, according to current guidelines, be written as DJ Ozma regardless of whether he's English, Japanese, or Zimbabwean. Jpatokal (talk) 12:00, 26 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]
This discussion is a request to change the current guidelines - of course other articles haven't been changed yet. DJ OZMA is an example, not the main point here Cooldra01 (talk) 13:13, 26 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]
The legal name is not the issue. The fact of the matter is that he refers to himself, and most of the press refer to him, as DJ OZMA. 浜崎あゆみ is another case because she refers to herself in English as "Ayumi Hamasaki". And this is a request to change the current guidelines when it comes to the names of people, not the names of companies, etc. "DJ OZMA" should be as viable a page name as "k.d. lang" and "will.i.am", regardless of how it is formatted.—Ryūlóng (竜龙) 18:11, 26 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Ozumano Sumitada is a transliteration of the name 尾妻野純直 but DJ OZMA is neither a transliteration nor a real Japanese word, and ブックオフ is a gairaigo word which is a transliteration of BOOKOFF (I personally think the article should be at BOOKOFF rather than Book Off, but this discussion is about the names of individuals specifically). However, the intricacies of transliteration to and from Japanese are not particularly relevant to the simple issue at hand. To take this away from the specific example of DJ OZMA (who is just one of the many individuals to which this issue applies), let's say there are two celebrities who are consistently referred to in numerous verifiable, reliable sources as FRED and wil.ma. Some time ago, these would have been altered on Wikipedia to Fred and Wilma. Nowadays, wil.ma is acceptable but FRED is debated and still usually altered to Fred, creating a double standard. If wil.ma gets to be wil.ma, FRED should get to be FRED. Ibanez100 (talk) 18:39, 26 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • No all-caps We shouldn't use all-caps for anything but abbreviations that are commonly written that way. As Cindamuse (talk · contribs) noted above, all-caps is much harder for everyone to read. Other types of odd capitalizations (e e cummings, eBay, CamelCase) are fine with me, but I draw the line at all-caps. D O N D E groovily Talk to me 23:24, 26 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]
    • Why is this the case? Why should we automatically assume that if something is written in all capital letters it is an abbreviation? If these people write their names in all capital letters, why shouldn't we? There's been an ongoing issue at Yui (singer) where "YUI" (the person's preferred name) has never been used. Similarly, Misia (Japanese singer) is known as "MISIA" everywhere but the English Wikipedia. We are only trying to suggest that these individuals' names be exempt from the capitalization rules, much like anyone who parses their name only in lower case letters.—Ryūlóng (竜龙) 23:49, 26 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]
      • Would D O N D E groovily like that? I wouldn't. Dicklyon (talk) 00:30, 27 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]
        • WP:JUSTDONTLIKEIT? Ibanez100 (talk) 02:06, 27 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]
          • My point is that people like to style their names to get attention, like our editor friend D O N D E groovily. That's fine, but doesn't mean that others, including WP, are bound to follow their styling. There is a more established trend to follow the strange downcasing that some people do with their names; I don't know why, but at least they're not obnoxiously attention-grabbing, so they are easier to tolerate. Dicklyon (talk) 03:04, 27 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]
            • Toleration is not an argument; it's a matter of individuality. For example, I can't stand will.i.am, as the names seem to blend in with the sentence, but that's just me. Cooldra01 (talk) 16:19, 27 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]
              • I don't like that either. But it's not where WP decided to draw the line. Dicklyon (talk) 19:10, 27 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]
            • Dicklyon, if we already follow the styling of people who don't use any capital letters or use CamelCasing, why shouldn't we give PEOPLE WHO WANT THEIR NAMES WRITTEN LIKE THIS the same treatment?—Ryūlóng (竜龙) 18:07, 27 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]
              • We don't, and we shouldn't, because it's widely regarded as obnoxious attention grabbing, or yelling. We don't necessarily respect CamelCase, either, at least not in trademarks and such. Dicklyon (talk) 19:09, 27 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]
                • More opinions instead of arguments based in fact. It's a double standard right now that lower case is allowed but all caps is not. If the majority of reliable sources report the name in one form, why should we use a less used form because some people have predispositions to assume that it has to be an acronym or that it's, as you say, "obnoxious attention grabbing, or yelling". If Nao Baba/Sumitada Ozumano/Show Ayanocozey/Naomi Camelia Yazima wishes to be known as DJ OZMA when he wears a blond afro wig, why shouldn't we refer to him as such? Same goes for Takamasa Ishihara, better known as MIYAVI, or Misaki Ito (allegedly this is her name), better known as MISIA.—Ryūlóng (竜龙) 19:20, 27 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]
                  • Because Wikipedia naming conventions are guided by the ease of use of our readers and the general rules of English spelling and punctuation, not the (putative) wishes of the people its articles describe, much less their marketing departments or PR flacks. Jpatokal (talk) 12:07, 28 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]
                    • Therein lies the problem: Wikipedia has given in years ago to non-caps "flacs" as you put it, however WP still bars all-caps. Why? Cooldra01 (talk) 14:56, 28 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]
                    • If you're concerned about Wikipedia caving in to notions like neutrality, verifiability, and special attention to accuracy in BLP articles, that train already left the station when Wikipedia began to allow things like k.d.lang and will.i.am. Adding all caps personal names to the list of allowable stylizations is not a radical idea, it's merely clarifying the existing rule by explicitly addressing a different type of stylization (less common in the English speaking world) which may have been a simple oversight when the rule was originally rewritten. If it's not an oversight and the rules on stylization were actually meant to allow wil.ma but disallow FRED, one would think that would already be specified in MOSCAPS. It's not. Something that explicitly mentions how to treat all caps personal names needs to be added to MOSCAPS, and preferably something explicitly allowing it, since the only two arguments I see against it are "I don't like it" and "but we've always done it such and such way", the first of which is not relevant and the second of which is a circular argument. Ibanez100 (talk) 19:54, 28 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]
                      • I've commented at length over at WT:MOS-JA, but I'll repeat a little bit of it here. First of all, brian d foy should probably move. Secondly, the reason we've allowed exceptions for all-lowercase but not for all caps, when it comes to personal names, is that all-caps means something in modern Standard Written English, whereas all-lowercase doesn't. When k.d. lang asks us to eschew caps on her name, she's not conflicting with readers' expectations that they must be dealing with an acronym, or else that someone is shouting.

                        I'm not saying this means we shouldn't capitalized DJ OZMA, just that there is a difference between the two sides of the "double-standard". -GTBacchus(talk) 15:36, 30 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]

                        • Likewise, I've replied to your WT:MOS-JA comment over at WT:MOS-JA, but I'll also answer more briefly here. I don't know much about brian d foy, but if he prefers an all lowercase name and there are sufficient reliable third party sources for it, I'd definitely support the notion of moving it. However, I disagree with the notion that all-lowercase doesn't mean anything: a noun in all lowercase indicates a common noun as opposed to a proper noun, so there is still an equal reader expectation issue in the sense that (a) a reader might not expect an all lowercase word to represent a personal name (personal names are proper nouns and capitalized), and (b) a reader would expect the word, which looks like a common noun, to be preceded by "a" or "the". In the end both k.d.lang and DJ OZMA are both equal offenders in terms of English rules and reader expectations, and in both cases their stylization could suggest something other than a personal name, which is why I think it's still a double standard to treat one significantly differently than the other. Ibanez100 (talk) 20:28, 30 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]
                          • I agree that "k.d. lang" and "DJ OZMA" are equal "offenders" (not my word choice) in terms of English rules, but not in terms of reader expectations. I am a fairly normal reader of English, and those are not equal in terms of my expectations. Are you saying that I'm wrong about my own expectations? -GTBacchus(talk) 22:52, 5 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]
                            • Other than personal preference or personal expectation (the latter being an aspect of preference), if we agree that all caps and no caps are "equal offenders" (my word choice) in terms of English usage, why treat them differently in regard to personal names? Ibanez100 (talk) 22:41, 6 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]
                              • It would seem that your argument equates the principle of least astonishment with IDONTLIKEIT. If it doesn't, then how am I misunderstanding you? I'm not talking about "personal" expectation, because I don't matter. I'm talking about what I think an average reader's expectation is. Also, you might note that I do not claim that we need to change DJ OZMA from all-caps. You seem to think that I'm arguing against all-caps. I'm not. -GTBacchus(talk) 16:08, 18 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]
                                • If you didn't intend to reference your own personal expectations, then I'm confused as well. When you said "my expectations" and "my own expectations" in your previous message, I assumed you were talking about your own expectations. Ibanez100 (talk) 23:51, 20 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]
                                  • Well, gee. When I said "I am a fairly normal reader of English," I was attempting to use myself as a representative of what I think most people's expectations are. I think I have some idea of what most people's expectations are. -GTBacchus(talk) 04:06, 25 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]
                        • I also replied to you at MOS-JA. Essentially, there are contexts one can read into words all in lowercase just as they can in all caps. It's only that you may choose not to read connotations into all lowercase that makes it seem like having something in all caps has some special meaning in English that is unique to its capitalization format.陣内Jinnai 21:06, 30 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]
                          • Yeah, I disagree. There is nothing in Standard Written English that is signified by all lower-case letters, other than the indication that the word is not a proper noun. In Standard Written English, all-caps are used for acronyms, and in Internet English, all-caps means shouting. There is no standard meaning for all-lowercase other than the default of "no special meaning". This isn't a matter of my choice, it's a simple fact about Standard Written English.

                            There are "contexts one can read into words all in lowercase", but these are not part of Standard Written English, and they are outside of the usual rules of the language. One can "read into" lots of things, but that doesn't make whatever you read into it a standard meaning. All-caps English has a standard meaning, and all-lowercase English does not.

                            "Connotations" are not remotely what I'm talking about here. One can read "connotations" into anything, such as font choice. However, that doesn't mean that font choice has a standard meaning in English. -GTBacchus(talk) 22:52, 5 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

                            • I'm confused. I thought we both agreed above that a lack of capitalization is not meaningless, but indicates a common noun as opposed to a proper noun? Since we are specifically talking about nouns, that is a standard meaning and significant. Ibanez100 (talk) 22:41, 6 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • Question - What are the specific guidelines that are at issue here? I see a line near the top that says all-lowercase is okay sometimes; and I see a line in the middle that says all-uppercase should be avoided. But I dont see one that says all-uppercase (persons names) are prohibited. But maybe I'm just missing it. Anyway, if there is such a prohibition, it may be because WP arose in the world of computers and the internet, where all-uppercase is considered rude and a sign of ignorance. So, many WP editors may have a reflexive dislike of all-uppercase. On the other hand, if a person uses all-uppercase in their name, we may as well be fair and permit it in article names, since we permit all-lowercase. --Noleander (talk) 02:15, 1 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]
    • There's no specific explicative rule which prohibits all-caps. But editors on WP generally use the quote "Avoid writing with all capitals" on WP:ALLCAPS to prevent most capitalizations from taking place. And yes, it's a double standard which I, and other editors believe is unfair. Cooldra01 (talk) 13:14, 1 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]
      • We're also talking about a very narrow exaction here even less than what can use all lower or CamelCase.陣内Jinnai 19:28, 1 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • I just noticed something in WP:MOSCAPS#General_principles: "Capital letters are sometimes a matter of regional differences. If possible, as with spelling, use rules appropriate to the cultural and linguistic context." Given that the examples discussed so far have all come from a culture where all caps personal names are nothing unusual, I now feel even more strongly that such capitalizations are already allowed, even preferred, by the MOS. (However, I would still like to see the phenomenon of all caps personal names explicitly addressed in the MOS somewhere for clarification.) Ibanez100 (talk) 23:06, 6 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • Have we met any sort of consensus or compromise? The quicker we finish this issue the better. Cooldra01 (talk) 07:19, 8 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]


    • I don't have a head count, but the only real reasons I've seen to not allow it are ascetics and the that its not a part of standard English. Given that last bit I'd have to say that argument is no longer applicable and the other amounts to WP:IDONTLIKEIT imo.陣内Jinnai 03:12, 9 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

When is something a proper noun?

The lead says "It may be helpful to consult the style guide on proper names if in doubt about whether a particular item is a proper name," but the linked page is too narrow to be useful; why do we even have it, or link it here? Then the next section says "Capital letters are sometimes a matter of regional differences. If possible, as with spelling, use rules appropriate to the cultural and linguistic context." Can someone say what this is about? Maybe an example?

More generally, how can we include some guidance in a form that's more general than the long list. I don't think we should have sections on ring roads, subways, dog breeds, methodologies, etc., but these are all areas where WP has a lot of capitalization that seems to be at odds with the general scheme "Wikipedia avoids unnecessary capitalization." On other hand, it can often be argued that these "follow common usage", since over-capitalization is very common, especially when people are promoting stuff they care about, or when usage is assessed by things in lists or titles.

Is a proper noun one that is "almost always capitalized" in sentence context in reliable sources? Should we say so? I recall that we used to have something like that, but I can't find it. Dicklyon (talk) 00:00, 22 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]

My view is that a proper noun refers to a unique entity, as opposed to a class of entities. The discussion this spun off included 'Extreme Programming', a proper noun referring to a specific, unique and titled methodology, not to be confused with 'extreme programming', which is standard English referring to any programming that may be considered extreme. In much the same way you might have 'a dog named Dog', you also have 'a form of extreme programming named Extreme Programming'. TechnoSymbiosis (talk) 23:49, 22 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I'm familiar with the definition that "a proper noun refers to a unique entity, as opposed to a class of entities," but the trouble is that people make up decriptive names for things out of generic terms, write them in upper case, and hope that they catch, which they don't always. Like with dog breeds: is the name of unique thing (a breed), or of a class of dogs? The insider dog groups usually capitalize them, but the style guides say they're not capitalized, except in group-insider publications. Similarly in many fields. If you look in books for "extreme programming" in lower case, you find quite a few: [16], [17], [18], [19], and [20]; and of the ones that capitalize, many use the "eXtreme" form, presumbably to illustrate the acronym "XP" rather than to imply a proper name. Is it possible that the generic "extreme programming" is used to refer to something other than the named method? Are there sources that illustrate that difference somehow? So what is our criterion for deciding which it is? Do we just accept as proper noun any generic term that someone has used as a name? Dicklyon (talk) 04:54, 23 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I couldn't offer much insight into dog breeds, it's not an area I have much interest in. In general, modified proper nouns retain their capitalisation unless they've come into common generic use. I know that a lot of dog breeds are named after regions so breeds like Alsatian, Pomeranian, Jack Russell would all make sense capitalised since they're essentially modified proper nouns. Breeds like Shih Tzu (lion dog) are unclear, and combinations of proper and regular nouns like Irish Setter are somewhat vague as well. I'm not sure what the general treatment in English should be for those. I think DGG's sentiment below is close, and I'd alter it slightly to say that when in doubt, use what the majority of reliable sources use. Discretion is necessary, of course, to assess the quality of sources in this regard. TechnoSymbiosis (talk) 00:24, 25 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I think that "majority" is far different from DGG's recommendation, which emphasizes "consistently" (and mine, which says "almost always"). Dicklyon (talk) 00:57, 25 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]
As I said, I altered DGG's sentiment. The rest is semantics, I interpret 'consistent' in this context to mean 'in agreement with' (by its definition), which is determined by looking at the number of quality sources that are 'in agreement' to determine what kind of capitalisation is used consistently across multiple sources. The difference between 'majority' and 'almost always' is simply a matter of threshold. TechnoSymbiosis (talk) 06:44, 25 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Right, we could make an ROC curve for it and then decide where we want to be. My point is that we should aim for a low false-positive rate (don't capitalize things unless we're real sure) by interpreting "consistently" to mean "almost always", as in > 95% of high-quality sources. Or maybe 90%. But I'd live with lower if someone makes a good case for it. But still it should be stricter than "usually capitalized in high-quality reliable sources" or in a "majority" of them. Dicklyon (talk) 06:50, 25 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I think the best rule is that something has to be consistently referred to as a proper name by third party discriminating sources, for us to do so. That most of the available sources may use capitals is not conclusive, because mot of them are likely to just copy the press release. Capitals in this context are promotional. I rewrite qwuite a number of articles of products and the like, and I start off by changing most of the mentions of fell names to "it" or the equivalent, and then changing the capitals to lower case. Those two steps alone are often enough to make something look like an encyclopedic article. DGG ( talk ) 02:56, 24 August 2011 (UTC) so promotional that , in the typical ca I normally remove them as a matter of course DGG ( talk ) 02:56, 24 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]
(fell=>full?) Jojalozzo 01:39, 25 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I have added what I think part of the answer is as a new section at Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Proper names#Compounds with proper names, with specific examples from various fields. I'm sure there will be some issues with some on the specifics, so let's discuss it some more and see if this is what we want. Dicklyon (talk) 06:03, 26 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]

See Wikipedia_talk:Manual_of_Style/Proper_names#new_addition_in_the_middle_of_a_content_dispute. --Enric Naval (talk) 21:12, 27 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]
This whole thing looks suspiciously like an attempt to alter WP:MOS#Celestial_bodies via proxy, in order to obtain an advantage in an ongoing content dispute in the MOS talk page. When Dicklyon edited this page, his only two edits were to change the examples from a capitalization that contradicted his position, to one that supported it. This parallel discussion and these changes were never mentioned in the MOS page despite the proposer participating several times. --Enric Naval (talk) 21:46, 27 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Via proxy? No, I'm trying to be open about figuring out what our capitalization style guideline is and how it applies. Dicklyon (talk) 22:31, 27 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]
It looks like my attempt to adjust examples to conform to normal capitalization, which is to say lowercasing of things that are commonly found lowercase in sources, has finally attracted a bit attention. Please join in here or at the revised guideline page that I linked above. Dicklyon (talk) 06:12, 27 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]
The current test application of the guideline clarification is at Talk:Halley's Comet#Requested move. Dicklyon (talk) 07:46, 27 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]

comet and galaxy examples

There was an edit-warring about the comet and galaxy examples, so I have replaced them with examples taken from IAU's official guidelines. This also makes this guideline fall in line with Wikipedia:Naming_conventions_(astronomical_objects). --Enric Naval (talk) 19:15, 27 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]

It was hardly an edit-warring; just trying to converge on examples that best make the point without too much controversy. Your change is highly biased toward letting the IAU determine our style. You removed the example of "Andromeda galaxy" lowercase from an IAU document in favor of one that's upper case. I hope this will further the discussion (which is why I made your new section a sub-section of the section above about proper names). Dicklyon (talk) 19:20, 27 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]
[21] is not "an IAU document", [22] is. --Enric Naval (talk) 19:31, 27 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]
How is it not? It's a page of their web site. Dicklyon (talk) 19:42, 27 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]
A random page in their website is not "an IAU document". the HTML version of an IAU document is. --Enric Naval (talk) 20:11, 27 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Sky and Telescope uses lower case for your example "eclipse comet". Your example "Milky Way Galaxy" is at odds with our article Milky Way that says "Milky Way galaxy". In books n-grams, the two cases are about equal (with many of the capitalized ones being in titles and headings). Dicklyon (talk) 19:53, 27 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Which means that the article needs to be updated to fit the official IAU guidelines, our own style guidelines and our naming convention on galaxies, just like Andromeda Galaxy already does. --Enric Naval (talk) 20:11, 27 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks, I hadn't looked at that section on galaxies. So maybe in writing our capitalization style guidelines, we need to note that in some wikiprojects we turn the styling over to certain outside official organizations in that field. It look like we do similarly for the American Kennel Club on dog breeds, though I haven't found it stated anywhere. Dicklyon (talk) 22:36, 27 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Not to the wikiprojects, but to the subject-specific naming guidelines. They should be linked under the relevant topic, like it already happens in |Animals, plants, and other organisms and make sure that they agree with each other. This is a style guideline, not a naming guideline. If the naming guideline rules a certain capitalization in the name (like in the fauna guideline), then the style guidelines shouldn't contradict it. That would lead to having different styles in the title and in the text. Aka, if the naming guideline says Bald Eagle is a capitalized proper noun, then the style guideline shouldn't recommend against capitalizing it. --Enric Naval (talk) 00:29, 28 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I just wanted to add here that my position on this issue is somewhere in the middle ground. It's important to distinguish what parts of a descriptor are part of the name and what parts aren't. Andromeda is probably the clearest of the examples - the galaxy's name is 'Andromeda', not 'Andromeda Galaxy'. The word 'galaxy' is external to the proper name and shouldn't be capitalised, in the same way the word 'planet' in 'planet Jupiter' is not part of the name of the planet and shouldn't be capitalised. Seems I wrote this too hastily. 'Andromeda' on its own is the name of the constellation that the Andromeda Galaxy appears within. So it seems 'galaxy' is part of the proper name for the galaxy and should be capitalised. I blame the early morning without coffee for this slip up :)
Milky Way is a borderline case because it is almost always seen in combinations of the form '[the] Milky Way [galaxy]' so I'd defer to the official body for capitalisation there in the same way we defer to IUPAC for the correct spelling of aluminium and sulfur. Halley's Comet is fairly straightforward, since the name of the comet isn't 'Halley's', it's 'Halley's Comet' or 'Comet Halley'. The word 'comet' is part of the proper name and thus is capitalised.
On the order of precedence for guidelines, my understanding is that specific guidelines override general guidelines. We have naming and style guides for specific areas of interest like flora, fauna, chemistry and so on that have guidance that contradicts the base manual of style, and in these cases the specific guidance is intended to take precedence. As it relates to this subject, the manual of style should not explicitly contradict more specific astronomy-related naming guidelines. If the intent is to change the naming guidance for astronomy-related subjects it should be done in the specific area first.
I will not that while I generally support reducing overcapitalisation, this effort to do so has been taken to absurd extremes over the past few months. Capital letters are a very common syntactic element to the English language with extensive and multiple purposes, and we should not be so zealous in our cleanup as to start infringing upon legitimate uses. Capitalisation has subtle but important meaning that is lost when it is inappropriately stripped. To paraquote Einstein, make things as simple as possible, but not simpler. TechnoSymbiosis (talk) 00:05, 30 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Like Halley's comet, Andromeda galaxy appears much more often with galaxy as a generic, especially if you discount the many uses in headings and titles where it is capitalized. See [23]. So if we're going to respect usage, those would be easy. On the other hand, if our style is to defer to specialist organization recommendations, then we'd go with the IAU and capitalize them, even though that IAU style is making only limited headway against usage in recent years (even on their own "Naming Astronomical Objects" page as I pointed out above). Dicklyon (talk) 05:52, 4 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Enric insists on having Halley's Comet and Andromeda Galaxy as examples in the capitalization guidelines, even though we are clearly far from any consensus on that decision, or on any policy or guideline that would support it. I agree that having examples of tough cases is a good idea, but only after they are decided. The Halley's comet requested move is 50-50 (much to my surprise, as I expected that to be an easy fix). Our policy is to only capitalize proper nouns – so people argue that things are proper because somebody else's style calitalizes them. And Techno argues for a different approach when he says "Capital letters are a very common syntactic element to the English language with extensive and multiple purposes." In WP, the purposes are only title initial, sentence initial, and proper noun; in other styles, yes, there are other purposes, like emphasis and identification of new preferred identifiers, explainin acronyms, etc. We don't do that; or do we? Dicklyon (talk) 17:46, 4 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]
There's confusion out there, and the boundary between generic and titular is being blurred by people and organisations who aim to boost the perceived importance, or somehow capture the uniqueness, of what are in effect common nouns. I note that the WikiProject UK Railways people have descended en masse to !vote against an RM to downcase Chief Mechanical Engineer, despite the fact that their own styleguide is silent on upcasing job-names, but says to downcase "station" in place-names such as "St Lawrence Junction station" (fair enough, the last). They've responded to none of the substantive arguments put at the RM, except that one user has referred to Proper noun in his defence (rather counterproductively, it seems, when you peruse the lead of that article). Tony (talk) 05:09, 5 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • I agree with Tony that 'Uppercaseitis' seems to be an issue in some areas of Wikipedia. It probably results from the misguided notion that things like job titles are proper nouns, which are capitalised, instead of common nouns, which are not. We capitalise the letters when creating acronyms, but that process ought not to be applied in reverse when expanding the acronym again: 'chief executive officer' becomes CEO, but should remain uncapitalised when expanded. --Ohconfucius ¡digame! 06:59, 5 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • Right, but is this really relevant here? There are thousands of chief executive officers, but there is only one "Comet Haykutake". --Enric Naval (talk) 07:11, 5 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Not a good example. There are zero comets Haykutake, and two comets Hyakutake [24]. In books, "comet Hyakutake" is frequently NOT capitalized (though more frequently it is, compared to the older named comets). By the way, the first author of the book I linked is a prof of physics and astronomy, and a member of the IAU; the second has written several books on comets and on astronomy, with major publishers; so I think they count as knowledgable and literate high-quality sources. Styles vary, but for this comet at least, the lower-case from seems to be overwhelmingly more popular in books; 5 of the 10 first Google books hits use lower case, and of the other 5, most are either sentence-initial or in titles; you can dig deeper if you need better evidence that styles vary. Dicklyon (talk) 16:51, 5 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]
There is only one "Great Comet Hyakutake"[25], and when sources speak of "Comet Hyakutake" they refer to C/1996 B2, not to C/1995 Y1, another comet discovered by the same person. See also "But this faint Comet Hyakutake was not "the" Comet Hyakutake."[26]. --Enric Naval (talk) 12:34, 6 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Enric, I'd like to get Noetica's opinion on this, but he seems to be scarce at the moment. Sorry to revert your addition of examples: could we discuss it here first ... and could I suggest not using currently contested examples? Thanks. Tony (talk) 09:47, 5 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Talk:Halley's_Comet#Requested_move was withdrawn, which means that the example is no longer contested. These examples were in the long-standing text, until Dicklyon started trying to change them. He was bold, he was reverted several times, and now he is supposed to discuss it.
Also, let's not change the rules depending on one's convenience. the "Comet Hale-Bopp" example in WP:MOS is contested (by me) and you refuse to remove it. --Enric Naval (talk) 12:34, 6 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]
This discussion appears to be stuck. Dicklyon tried to get consensus for his new example and failed, so he has now gone and removed the old example, which does have consensus and is in agreement with current practice. Guidelines should not be held hostage like this. --Enric Naval (talk) 21:19, 7 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

OK, this is the long standing text, with grammar fixes so it's clear that it's a comma-separated list of examples:

Names of planets, moons, asteroids, comets, stars, constellations, and galaxies are proper nouns and begin with a capital letter. For example: "The planet Mars can be seen tonight in the constellation Gemini, near the star Pollux", "Halley's Comet is the most famous of the periodic comets", or "The Andromeda Galaxy is a spiral galaxy".

If you think that these are not the best examples, then please propose replacement examples for discussion instead of removing again the long standing ones. --Enric Naval (talk) 12:46, 8 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I haven't looked at the principles involved, but whatever text ends up there, shorter is better:

Names of planets, moons, asteroids, comets, stars, constellations, and galaxies are proper nouns and begin with a capital letter ("The planet Mars in the constellation Gemini, near the star Pollux", "Halley's Comet is the most famous of the periodic comets", "The Andromeda Galaxy is a spiral galaxy").

And it needs to be harmonised with MoS main page. Tony (talk) 13:48, 8 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I have no problem with that change.
The long-standing text was already harmonised. The main page WP:MOS#Celestial_bodies has used for years these exact same examples. --Enric Naval (talk) 15:14, 8 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Long-standing, but hotly contested when looked at recently, as it's not harmonized with the top-level rule on /Capital letters. Surely we can use something less controversial to illustrate what we agree on? Dicklyon (talk) 00:14, 9 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Please show where these examples are "hotly contested" or "controversial". Halley's Comet move request shows the contrary, that the attempts to remove the capitalization are controversial and hotly contested. You can't keep indefinite roadblocks on guidelines because you don't like their contents. --Enric Naval (talk) 20:05, 12 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, that's the place – 50-50 split between caps and not. Dicklyon (talk) 20:47, 12 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]
More like 30/60 against moving, which would have resulted in "no consensus to move" if you hadn't withdrawn. (without the neutrals, a 33-66 split against moving)
Tally:
move / follow general manuals of style
Dicklyon
kwami
Tony
Jojalozzo
Noetica
don't move / follow IAU style
Serendipodous
Enric Naval
Powers
Baseball Bugs
Boson
FoxCE
TechnoSymbiosis
Wavelength
Greg L.
Carcharoth
Casliber
neutral/other
Trovatore
70.24.246.151
--Enric Naval (talk) 23:04, 12 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]
If you can't find proof that these examples don't have consensus, then I will restore them. You are free at any moment to go and try to change the consensus via Requested Move. --Enric Naval (talk) 21:08, 17 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

There was already an edit warring report about people reverting the examples without discussion. People removing the examples should engage the discussion and provide examples of how these examples don't fit the current practice in celestial bodies or how there is no consensus, instead of simply claiming without any proof that there is no consensus, or that there is significant disagreement, wikipedia is not based in WP:IDONTLIKEIT arguments. --Enric Naval (talk) 08:28, 8 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Capitalization of hyphenated proper nouns

I've spent the past 20 minutes or so searching WP:MOS and the archives of this talk page, and I have found virtually nothing that states how we should treat capitalization of internal parts of proper nouns (e.g., "Great Black-backed Gull" or "Great Black-Backed Gull"). This is it:

(Part of the problem is trying to figure out what to call this. I've seen people use ambiguous terms like "mid-caps" and "compound words", call the separators hyphens or dashes, and of course spell "capitalisation" with "s" or "z", making for challenging searching.)

Anyway, I'd suggest we make a specific call on whether to capitalize internal elements (there's another variation), add it to MOS:CAPS and WP:MOS, and perhaps add a link to it in MOS:DASH, as many people don't understand the difference between "hyphen" and "dash". ~ Jeff Q (talk) 12:12, 28 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I don't see any books with internal capitalization in "Great Black-backed Gull", or a few other gulls I checked (except for sometimes in titles, e.g. for Red-Legged Kittiwake). I'm not sure how general it is, but if that's the pattern, it would be useful to say so. But not in MOS:DASH please. Dicklyon (talk) 05:43, 5 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Always go with the sources. The Chicago MOS prescribes capitalising the second element of a hyphenated term if it's a noun or proper adjective, which means 'Great Black-backed Gull' would be correct with 'backed' as a common adjective, however under CMOS styling, 'Great Black-Back Gull' would also be correct with 'back' as a noun. These obviously aren't consistent with each other if written in the same article, which is the main purpose of a MOS to begin with. My stance is that while a manual of style is useful, it does not need to be strictly adhered to where consistency is sacrificed. Sources, on the other hand, do need to be strictly adhered to under Wikipedia's policies, so prioritise them above the MOS. TechnoSymbiosis (talk) 23:56, 5 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I find the policy on style and sources quite confusing. Where can I get more info on sources taking precedence over MOS? Jojalozzo 04:36, 6 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Capitalization more generally

←An interesting issue that has become more pointed recently. To what extent should WP's house style be overridden by external sources? There are several unresolved problems in drawing on outside sources: (1) If they are at variance with our own, what criteria should be used to determine that they trump it? (2) To what extent should factions and subgroups of professions and topics be able to determine exceptions to our house style and on what basis? (3) How is internal stylistic consistency of WP to be pitted against external inconsistency?

A case in point is corporate and professional abuse of capitalisation. In some areas—business studies, management, telecom, IT, to name a few—the capitalisation of what our guidelines and policies say are common nouns is rampant. We need to establish a set of meta-guidelines, in fact, so that when these dissonances arise, the discussion can at least be a little structured. I propose something like these questions should be asked when determining whether a usage should be adopted by WP, whether generally, or by exception for a particular topics or subtopic:

  1. How reliable (i.e., authoritative, widely used, respected) are the external authorities. And are they standard, general styleguides; styleguides (New Harts Rules, Chicago Manual of Style) that claim authority over or give guidance for writing within a profession or field (North American dog-breeding); or in-house guidelines (IBM))?
  2. How divergent are these "reliable sources", and what proportion of styleguides recommend the usage?
  3. What is common practice among writers in the field?
  4. What is the extent of any disadvantage in allowing inconsistency by making an exception to (or even changing) WP's house style? Tony (talk) 05:02, 6 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Agreed that it's an interesting issue. The base question to ask in my opinion is: when should syntax be preserved, and when should it be subject to local style guidelines? To answer that, we need to know if the syntax we observe in sources is specific or is governed by the source's own style guidelines. The latter question has caused some disagreement on Wikipedia recently, with different editors making assumptions about the reasons for a source using a particular syntax (eg. accusations that the source is incorrectly propagating marketing capitalisation) and using those assumptions as a basis for favouring one syntax over another.
My view is that verifiability, as a core policy, trumps our WP:MOS guideline. If an entity (of any kind) is verifiably known as P.A.K.A., should our MOS override this because we don't render dots between letters of an abbreviation? Can a reader verify the name of this entity if we've altered it based on internal rules? I don't believe a manual of style has the authority to make that decision.
Wikipedia's standard is verifiability over truth, and in this case I believe the verifiable syntax we have available to us using our standard methods (by reviewing usage across the majority of reliable sources) should take precedence over the 'truth' of local style guidelines. By its nature, Wikipedia's manual of style is one single style, while our sources should, in theory, represent many different styles, through which we can assess which rendition is most common amongst all the styles available, not just the single style we employ here.
I mentioned in another thread, we already apply the standard of verifiability to spelling. We don't change the name of the movie Inglourious Basterds to Inglorious Bastards because that's the proper way of spelling in English. The title of the movie is intentionally misspelled, verifiably so across multiple reliable sources, and it's our job to reflect what the sources say. In fact, the misspelling of the title of this movie conveys information subtly different to the corrected version, which I won't digress on. The point being, Inglourious Basterds is the verifiable title of the movie, not the true spelling of the words used, and altering that title to correct it would cause it to lose some of its meaning.
With that in mind, why do we treat syntax differently? If changing the spelling of Inglourious Basterds to Inglorious Bastards is inappropriate and causes loss of meaning, why would changing the syntax of DJ OZMA to DJ Ozma be somehow more acceptable, or avoid losing potential meaning? Why is iPod acceptable as an exception to the rule, but Halley's Comet had a proposed move to Halley's comet? I understand the desire to avoid giving names more importance than they deserve because of zealous marketing, but using the verifiability of the majority of reliable sources easily mitigates this - Macy*s may be how the store is marketed, but the majority of sources simply refer to the store as Macy's. The band may label their albums as Koяn, but the sources mostly refer to them as Korn. And if the majority of sources are referring to something with unusual syntax in contradiction of our manual of style, who are we to declare that unusual syntax as inappropriate and modify it? That's not only out of our scope, but it contradicts our mission as a tertiary source. TechnoSymbiosis (talk) 06:23, 6 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Verifiability trumps truth: that might be ok in Armenian, but English is sprawling and huge. You're unlikely to get all sources saying the same thing, which is why there's a problem in just saying "Use reliable sources" for style (I presume you mean "style" when you say "syntax"). Calls need to be made by WP because usage and guidance out there tends to vary. If you want an example, sentence case in titles is our house style, yet is not common out there. Tony (talk) 06:35, 6 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]
That's related to my point. Under what criteria are you assessing a source to determine if its syntax is a matter of style or a matter of convention? Is Extreme Programming a stylistic capitalisation or an actual proper noun? Is it capitalised because it should be, or because marketing minds behind the term have influenced the source to use capitalisation where it shouldn't? These are subjective assessments that each editor is liable to be doing differently, as indeed has already happened. We don't need to make subjective assessments like that. Our policies on sources already handle situations where sources differ in their factual information, why can't this existing framework be extended to handle cases of differing syntax as well? Given enough sources, it's not usually difficult to establish the most common representation of a name. TechnoSymbiosis (talk) 23:37, 6 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Extreme Programming and eXtreme Programming are stylizations. If you look at books, you find both of those, as well as extreme programming, all referring to the same model. It is not the name of an individual anything. But most common may be capitalized, because it's often being promoted as special; going with most common is not a good answer if our house style is to only capitalize proper nouns. Dicklyon (talk) 02:56, 9 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]
You'd be mistaken, Dicklyon, and your google-fu could use some work. Extreme Programming is a proper noun referring to a specific and titled methodology. A more appropriate Google Books search across reasonably good quality sources shows nine out of the first ten results use Extreme Programming exclusively, one uses a mixture of eXtreme Programming and Extreme Programming, and none use extreme programming. As a software developer myself, I've reviewed enough quality sources on the subject over the years to have a reasonably good grasp on common usage in the IT discipline.
You have, however, succinctly proven my point. Subjective analysis of the reasons behind capitalisation of a term in sources is precisely what leads editors to reach differing good-faith conclusions. Applying the established framework of intelligent analysis of high quality sources shows that there is, in fact, a clear single answer to the question. The latter is the criteria we should be using for syntax in Wikipedia, not the subjective assumptions of editors. Or in simpler terms, we should be conveying the syntax in use by our sources (verifiability), not what we think the correct syntax should be (truth). TechnoSymbiosis (talk) 04:11, 9 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Why would you say it's more appropriate to look to sources that have "Extreme Programming" in their titles? Aren't those exactly the ones that are likely to be biased toward promoting it more? That's my point. Your "high-quality sources on the subject" are too close to the subject to be treated as independent reliable sources. You assert that it's a proper noun, but many independent sources do not agree with you; many interpret it as a "programming model", whether or not it's also a "specific and titled methodology." Specific and titled doesn't mean proper. The reasonable interpretation is that many are capitalizing it for other reasons. Dicklyon (talk) 04:53, 9 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]
What an absurd statement. Expert sources in the software development field are 'too close' to the field it describes to accurately describe the field it describes? This isn't a case of primary sourcing with a person writing about themselves, and knowledgeable sources are exactly the kind we're after here. You seem to be in favour of throwing out the content of comprehensive sources in favour of 'Software Development for Dummies'. To the best of my knowledge, that's not at all in line with the norm here. TechnoSymbiosis (talk) 22:25, 11 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, that would be absurd; glad you said it, not me. What I said is that they're too close to be "independent", not too close to be accurate; particularly, with respect to styling decisions like capitalization, they are not independent if they have "Extreme Programming" in their titles. Insiders in a field tend to capitalize the stuff they care about, and that's a large part of what's going on here. Is there any other plausible explanation for the fact that capitalization is more common in books with "Extreme Programming" in their titles than in books without, which are still computer-related books, but more independent of that particular topic. Dicklyon (talk) 22:36, 11 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I fail to see how academics in the IT field are too close to the field to be considered independent. Out of curiosity, did you look at who the authors of the various books in the search results were? Implying that all of them are somehow too close to the subject to be independent doesn't make sense. You'll note, however, that it was your search that required 'Extreme Programming' to be in the title; mine did not. (struck, misread the search terms hastily) I can answer your 'plausible explanation' with a comparison: which source is likely to be more accurate with regards to the description of the process of quantum entanglement, a book by a professor in the field titled 'Mechanics of Quantum Entanglement', or a book by a professor in the field titled 'A Guide to Understanding Physics'? A specialised source cannot be considered inferior (or worse, somehow invalid) on that basis alone, and in fact we tend to rely on specialised sources for accurate information in most scientific fields. Computer science really isn't an exception. TechnoSymbiosis (talk) 23:02, 11 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]
You need to look at those searches again. I used the negation operator "-" to find books without the topic in the title, to get a bit of independence. You didn't. Google book search puts a premium on finding your search term in the title, so that's all you got. Half (5 of 10) of your hits are in the "The XP Series", so it's not surprising that they have a uniform style of treating their topic as special. Certainly nothing wrong with that, and no criticism of their authors is implied by saying that they are not independent of the topic. I looked again at your 10 hits; only 1 of them (Extreme Programming Pocket Guide) uses "Extreme Programming" exclusively (even if you ignore "eXtreme Programming" as an alternative stylization). The others do so mostly, but betray their editors' true feelings in places like their bibliographic information pages, where they downcase either their own titles or their topic areas (typically including "extreme programming", "Extreme programming", or "eXtreme programming"). The styling adopted in the books is fine for the books, but they're not claiming that they have a proper name in "Extreme Programming." Dicklyon (talk) 23:24, 11 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I struck the comment on search terms above, was a bit distracted back-checking. I only got three books in the first page of results from the same series, and bibliographical entries are typically supposed to preserve the style used in the source. In any case, I think you'd be hard-pressed to find explicit confirmation that anything is a proper noun so it's little surprise that the sources make no such claim. Looking at our own article on proper nouns, we see the example Mary lives on Floor 3 of the Main Building, which states 'the capitalization shows that 'Main Building' is the name of the building, not just a description of it' and classifies it as a proper noun. This same logic applies to Extreme Programming, which is the name of a process, not just a description of it. In my experience, the capitalisation here is consistent with usage in the majority of quality reliable sources which is the criteria I've argued we should be using for determining this to begin with. 'Is it a proper noun?' is a subjective question we shouldn't be asking, but rather 'What do the sources say?'. It's not simply a matter of style. TechnoSymbiosis (talk) 23:41, 11 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]
The problem is just that we don't agree on WP style for capitalization. You want to capitalize anything that most sources capitalize, and I only want to capitalize things that "almost all" sources capitalize. I thought the latter was WP style, but it becomes less clear; in particular, every specialized area wants to capitalize their own stuff. The astronomers want to capitalize galaxy in Andromeda galaxy, even though a minority of sources do so, because that's what the astronomy authorities recommend. The dog fanciers want to capitalize retriever in Labrador retriever, because that's what the AKC recommends. The software development geeks want to capitalize whatever O'Reilly capitalizes, because that's what they know. It's all a natural part of English usage: people over-capitalize what they're into. But usage outside of these specialist fields is, in my opinion, more like what WP should strive to follow. Less over-capitalization, reserving caps for actual proper names, not every made-up name, just seems more encyclopedic. You brought up Extreme Programming; it's just one of many possible good examples where insider sources capitalize more than independent sources do. Nothing special in that. Dicklyon (talk) 03:17, 12 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]
For specialized fields, you want to follow the conventions of sources outside of the fields, because they differ from the sources inside the fields? --Enric Naval (talk) 09:32, 12 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]
No, I don't think "follow the sources" is a useful concept for style issues. But the more independent sources are often useful to get some distance from the insider's view, especially on things like capitalization style where people generally tend to over-capitalize their own important stuff. Dicklyon (talk) 15:23, 12 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I agree with TechnoSymbiosis. I have often thought lately that simply applying Wikipedia's "verifiability over truth" standard to capitalization would solve nearly all of the disagreements on this talk page. Why should Wikipedia's policy be "verifiability over truth and everything must be citable to reliable third party sources, except in the case of capitalization in which we will impose our own preferences and alter verifiable information to what we think it 'should' be"? That doesn't make any sense and seems contrary to the core concepts of Wikipedia. In my view, using reliable third party sources as a standard for capitalization is not only more in tune with the spirit of Wikipedia in general, it's also a much simpler and more internally coherent policy that would greatly streamline the MOS. Ibanez100 (talk) 05:02, 9 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • Verifiability governs content not style. "Verifiability trumps truth" means we present the content of the RS. Can we apply that principle to style if all the sources don't agree? Do we style a sentence that is supported by source Y using Y's style and a sentence supported by source X using X's style and mix up the styles however we like if a sentence is supported by two sources with different styles? What if the sources do all agree? And then a new source is added that doesn't agree?? Please explain this "established framework of intelligent analysis of [the style of] high quality sources" that is not founded on editors' subjective interpretation. Jojalozzo 05:53, 9 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]
    • If every source says something different, I would question how many reliable sources are being used and whether the subject is in fact notable. Realistically you are not going to encounter a situation with a notable subject where there are only five sources and one source says KISS, one says Kiss, one says KisS, one says kIss, and and the other says kiSS. So in my mind that is a non-issue. If the sources do all agree and then one source is added that doesn't agree, that's no different than if that were to happen with any other facet of the article: go with the version that is the most verifiable in reliable sources. If there is a less common version that is also notable for some reason, note it. If two versions are equally verifiable, choose one and make note of the other. If the other version later becomes more verifiable, change it to that. All of these examples are simply applying Wikipedia's standard of verifiability to capitalization. Ibanez100 (talk) 23:55, 9 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • I strongly disagree. When we add a verifiable source that contradicts other sources with respect to content, we present that new content in the article. We don't just "make a note of it" it because it is not consistent with what's already there. Inconsistent content presents no problem - everyone accepts it as part of the give and take of intelligent discourse. But we want a consistent style so when two verifiable sources have different styles, we cannot include them both and thus have to violate verifiability as you propose ("choose one and make a note of the other"). That's exactly why verifiability works for content but not for style. Jojalozzo 03:55, 10 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • That's what I meant by "make a note of it": present it in the article if it is notable. Let's say there is an individual whose name is usually presented in reliable third party sources as GEORGE, but is sometimes presented in reliable third party sources as george. The lead can go something like: "GEORGE (born 1992 in Kalamazoo), sometimes known as george, is a random example. GEORGE was the first example to ..." Of course, editors should use their own judgment as to whether the less-common capitalization is notable enough for inclusion. I never suggested to violate verifiability; quite the opposite, as the entirety of my two comments above is in favor of using verifiability as the standard for capitalization. My words "choose one and make a note of the other" were specifically in regard to what could be done in the rare event that two capitalization styles are exactly equally represented in reliable third party sources. A far more serious violation of verifiability would be to (again using the example above) discard both GEORGE and george in favor of George, thus rejecting verifiability entirely in favor of arbitrary stylistic concerns. Ibanez100 (talk) 06:11, 10 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • I assert that the capitalisation of names is not a purely stylistic concern. Capitalisation and other syntactic elements like hyphens and apostrophes confer distinctive meaning to a name that are simply incorrect if altered. 'van Buren' and 'Van Buren' are not the same and for any given individual, only one is correct. 'Chesterfield-Smith' and 'Smith-Chesterfield' have different meanings even though the low-level intention of the hyphen to produce a double-barrelled name is the same in each. While I have no objection to following standard style for common sentence structure and word representations, names are an exceptional case that should never be subject to alteration on stylistic grounds. To do so alters the meaning of the name away from what was intended. It's not our job to preserve naming syntax to the exclusion of all else, but it is our job to accurately reflect what the sources say. If it can be determined that the majority of reliable sources use a non-standard syntax, we have no grounds to change it. Our project's main pillars trump stylistic concerns, in both letter and intention. TechnoSymbiosis (talk) 22:53, 11 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]
      • Techno, syntax means word order. Could you explain what you mean in your use of this item? I've heard no convincing arguments in this thread that my initial list of four criteria (= discussion points) is not a good idea for making stylistic determinations. For this purpose, I've changed the bullets into numbers, to make referral easier. Tony (talk) 03:00, 10 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]
        • In my understanding, syntax can mean either the specifics of word order, or the broader subject that concerns itself with all of the contributing rules and practices relating to sentence construction, including punctuation and capitalisation. I use the term in the broader sense. To address your numbered points:
  1. As far as names are concerned, the external authorities we should be relying on are relevant, good quality sources. What external style guides do may certainly be relevant for formulating our general style guidelines, but I believe names should be an exception in which accurate reproduction is more important than local style concerns. In areas like science where there is such a wealth of sources that it can be difficult to determine a forerunner, deferring to official representative bodies is appropriate, as we do with the IUPAC for chemistry topics.
  2. In practice, sources can be completely divergent on syntax, in much the same way that sources can be completely divergent on content. Applying the same (or at least similar) approaches to resolving both simplifies and streamlines our processes for determining what to use.
  3. Common practice should be determinable from examining available sources. In most fields there's an identifiable 'majority' standard of practice, and in areas where that's unclear (aluminium vs aluminum, sulphur vs sulfur, etc) it's possible to defer to official representative bodies like IUPAC for chemistry, IAU for astronomy and so on. In the absence of both of these, editors should be able to come to a consensus through discussion, as happens in every other situation.
  4. Wikipedia should strive to be as consistent as possible, without compromising the precision of our information. Syntax in general - and capitalisation especially - conveys meaning (eg. iPod has a differed meaning to Ipod, with the lowercase 'i' having a specific technology implication that is lost if altered) and our in-house style should not attempt to alter that meaning. Our style can quite happily apply to general writing without adversely affecting the meaning of names.
Hopefully this addresses your questions. TechnoSymbiosis (talk) 22:53, 11 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

English translations of French song titles

When presenting the English translation of a French song title, does the English translation follow the French style for text formatting of titles (capitalizing only the first letter of the first word)? Or does it follow capitalization rules for English titles (capitalizing the first letter of all words except for connecting conjunctions, prepositions, and articles)?

  • A "Chanson sans paroles" ("Song without words")
  • B "Chanson sans paroles" ("Song Without Words")

Rjaklitsch (talk) 12:31, 6 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

According to MOS:ALBUM, it looks like the standard is to use the French capitalization style in that situation, though it also says that in most cases you shouldn't translate it at all. Ibanez100 (talk) 00:39, 9 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Regarding the presentation of English translations of French titles, the Chicago Manual of Style (16th edition) has this to say on English translations of foreign titles:

14.108 Translated title supplied by author or editor
If an English translation of a title is needed, it follows the original title and is enclosed in brackets, without italics or quotation marks. It is capitalized sentence-style regardless of the bibliographic style followed. (In running text, parentheses are used instead of brackets; see 11.6.) See also 14.110.

So according to CMS, the correct style for translated glosses in running text is "Chanson sans paroles" (Song without words). For published English translations, standard rules on titles apply.
Rjaklitsch (talk) 13:38, 10 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Advice on job-title capitalisation?

There's been a move request at Talk:Chief Mechanical Engineer to downcase the title, per WP:Job titles (part of the title policy), and the MoS section on the same point. The move request was notified at the UK Railways WikiProject (at variance with the generality of the article title, this article was intended to be specifically about chief mechanical engineers in British-related railway companies). At that stage, this was expressed in the one-line lead followed by a huge number of unreferenced examples of holders of such positions mostly in the 19th century. In trying to fathom the theme of the article, I failed to see that the title should have been more specific as well as downcased: the job title is used generically (still is) and the scope is restricted at the same time (not US-related, not chief mechanical engineers in power stations or on ferries or in aeronautics or factories).

Now, the railways editors really care about the notion of chief mechanical engineers—in good faith, like the wider phenomenon of corporate and professional upping of importance via capitalisation—but where will it all end? They descended on the RM and !voted en masse against downcasing.

Because I pointed out the shambles the article was in, an editor has kindly worked on it, adding references and expanding the information. But the theme is still scoped in relatively narrow terms, and in the main text it's not, for example, Joshua Smithers, Chief Mechanical Engineer, Northampton Railway Company.

I do think we need a centralised approach to this. Almost the entire category of transport occupations is in lower case, as are just about all other occupation categories. Why must this one stick out? And is it hogging the name-space of the generic article that probably should/will be created on chief mechanical engineers? (There are quite a lot of chief this and chief that articles, surprisingly.)

Your advice and comments at the RM would be appreciated—maybe I'm confused now. I'm leaving the same notice at WP:TITLE and WT:MOS.

Thanks. Tony (talk) 16:01, 7 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Well it soon will be: for example, Joshua Smithers, Chief Mechanical Engineer, Northampton Railway Company. Pyrotec (talk) 08:25, 9 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Sorry, I'm not following. What will soon be what? Jojalozzo 13:32, 9 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]
This issue is a fairly widespread one, certainly far exceeding the boundaries of Wikipedia. There's no hard and fast rule in the English language for this. Typical attitudes that I've seen are that titles before names, such as 'Chief Mechanical Engineer Joshua Smithers' are capitalised as they become part of the name, but titles after names, such as 'Joshua Smithers, chief mechanical engineer' are downcased as they become an identifying appositive. I'd rather see Wikipedia adapt to appropriate context-sensitive usage, as we do with the 'American English vs British English' issue, than to try to assert a particular rule.
That said, in the case you gave above, WP:Job titles actually supports the capitalised version of the title. Quoted, 'The correct formal name of an office can be treated as a proper noun, so it is correct to write "Louis XVI was the French king" or "Louis XVI was King of France"', from which it can be quite reasonably and logically argued that 'Chief Mechanical Engineer' is the formal name of an office and is allowed to be treated as a proper noun. TechnoSymbiosis (talk) 23:30, 13 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Request for Comment: Capitalization of common names of animal species

Request for comment on mewithoutYou band name

The band stylizes their name as mewithoutYou, however it is my opinion that the name should be capitalized as MewithoutYou at the start of sentences and when standing alone. An anonymous editor, or possibly several, is (are) objecting and changing it to a leading lower case in all instances. --Walter Görlitz (talk) 15:50, 20 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

The band's manager has decided to enter the fray and is modifying the article so that instances of the band name start with a lower case letter in some instances. Assistance would be requested on the article's talk page. --Walter Görlitz (talk) 22:03, 15 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Names of "laws" (adages)

In List of eponymous laws we see that none (or few depending on recent up-caser activity) of these laws capitalize "law". In List of scientific laws and List of scientific laws named after people we also see "law" lower-cased exclusively. This lower-case usage in technical and scientific categories is an established style in this project and also well reflected in the literature. (There are many exceptions in computer science and engineering where Up-Cased Names for Ideas is more the norm.)

However, we see how "laws" (adages, really) that have caught on in popular culture are capitalized in most usage - due, I think, to the prevalence of such usage in popular media where style is dictated by the requirements of sales and marketing. Here is a sample of such "laws":

Also see Category:Adages.

Do we want to make an exception to the MoS for these adages in fiction and popular culture? Jojalozzo 16:46, 20 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I oppose any such change. We have a perfectly coherent and consistent guideline in this matter, and it is in accord with CMOS, New Hart's Rules, OED (in most of its definitions for such laws, as supported by most of its relevant citations), and most other authorities that take notice of the issue. Yes, there is a tendency in popular media to capitalise, especially in reporting or using viral coinages like "Murphy's law". When such whimsical expressions find their way into serious published work, they are treated variously. Wikipedia can choose consistency, simplicity, and rationality here; or it can bend to inferior practice. I know which I prefer for the Project.
NoeticaTea? 00:45, 23 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

First of all, let's make clear that physics and scientific laws are not capitalized in sources and would not be affected by this change.

Fictious laws occur capitalized in sources. For example Finagle's Law or Parkinson's Law. For example, Murphy's Law is capitalized in both Merriam-Webster dictionary and Oxford English Dictionary. And the "The new office professional's handbook" by American Heritage Dictionary recommends to capitalize "popular and fictitious laws". "popular laws" is too vague to be useful, but it should be easy to distinguish which laws are fictitious and which ones aren't.

For computing and economic law, like Moore's Law, the results vary depending on which law you look at. I see, for example, that "Dictionary of computer and internet words" from American Heritage Dictionary doesn't capitalize Moore's law. So I don't think it's necessary to capitalize those.

So, let's capitalize only fictious laws. Nothing more to add, Jojalozzo already explained well. --Enric Naval (talk) 17:10, 23 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

  • No new exception to MOS - The MOS currently discourages capitals, and it has no specific guidance for fictitious laws. It appears that many fictitious laws are capitalized by the sources, and thus the WP community may make case-by-case exceptions as needed, which is okay, since it is acceptable for WP to make exceptions to conform to the sources. It may be that, as the decades go by, these capitalized laws may become lower case in the sources, who knows? But adding a new rule to the MOS would be overkill, and WP:Instruction creep. Better is to leave the MOS alone, prefer lowercase, and just handle this on a case-by-case basis in individual articles. --Noleander (talk) 18:49, 29 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • MOS:CAP is being cited to prevent those moves, and opposers say that capitalization is a style issue that doesn't need to follow sources. That is why the exception is needed. --Enric Naval (talk) 17:27, 30 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, but the whole point is that each of these fictitious laws need to be examined in any event on a case by case basis. The MOS lowercase rule is the starting point. The community can agree to upper case for individual articles, if the sources so indicate. That is normal WP procedure: the system is working. If we were to add a new rule to the MOS ("Uppercase is okay for ficticious laws") then that would not help at all, because many fictitious laws use lower case, and so we'd still have to have article-by-article discussions to examine the sources. (Indeed, the proposed new exception could backfire, because some editors may mistakenly use uppercase for laws which sources treat as lowercase)! In other words: it is already WP policy that MOS guidelines can be overridden, on a case-by-case basis, if the community consensus so agrees, after examining the sources. The very top of this MOS guideline says "use common sense in applying it; it will have occasional exceptions." --Noleander (talk) 17:33, 30 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Why should the style of sources be considered in applying Wikipedia's MoS? Isn't the purpose of a style guide to maintain consistency and minimize confusion? Isn't style supposed to be independent of other style?
What is the benefit of modifying style on a "case by case basis"?
Does "use common sense in applying it; it will have occasional exceptions" mean use sources' style whenever most differ from Wikipedia's? Why is that common sense? Jojalozzo 11:51, 11 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • No exception to the MoS for adages. Agree with Noetica above, that Wikipedia has it's own style with respect to this issue, and we should be consistent with that style guide regardless of the style used by popular media. LK (talk) 09:31, 11 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • No new exception - These fictional laws are treated in different ways by sources, but where they commonly are capitalized in said sources, I think a consensus can just be made to have exceptions on those articles; a new rule at MOS seems to me as though it would be far too much. ~~ Hi878 (Come shout at me!) 00:27, 13 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • No exception – there's no reason to not just treat these pop laws like all the others, and use WP's lower-case style. Dicklyon (talk) 03:03, 13 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • No exception in cases involving a possessive noun. I'm agnostic, though, about cases like "(T)he (T)hree (L)aws of (R)obotics". Seems to me that MoS does not cover this type of case. Capitalisation may possibly help in some cases (e.g. to stop the reader thinking "What three laws? No-one's mentioned anything about laws..."). --FormerIP (talk) 23:21, 18 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Optimising examples at WP:CAPS

Does anyone disagree that contentious examples should be substituted with those that have wide consensus? Tony (talk) 09:02, 8 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]

No disagreement. Examples should, where possible, have wide consensus. --Boson (talk) 12:16, 8 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Consensus doesn't mean unanimity. This is all about the comet examples, where Tony and others failed to show consensus against the examples. Since they can't address the actual arguments, they have first resorted to edit-warring and now to creating this discussion, which again allows them to avoid addressing inconvenient arguments. --Enric Naval (talk) 12:49, 8 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]

As I understand it, the capitalization of the first part of the name (e.g. "Andromeda" or "Halley's") is undisputed but the capitalization of the second part of the name (e.g. "galaxy" of "comet") is somewhat contentious and may not be the same for all such objects. Regardless of the motivation of any given editor, this seems to make them bad examples, examples being intended to use a specific instance that holds true for all entities in the classes described in the rule, as understood by the reader. If these examples are meant to do more than illustrate the rule "Names of planets, moons, asteroids, comets, stars, constellations, and galaxies are proper nouns and begin with a capital letter", then the rule should be changed. I disagree with the use of the example "Andromeda Galaxy" with a capital 'G' unless the rule (that it is meant to illustrate) clearly states that both parts of the name should be capitalized. Personally, I agree with the capitalization of Galaxy and Comet in these two cases, but I disapprove of examples being used to imply general rules that are unstated and may be against consensus in individual cases. For instance, I would understand the examples to imply that "Andromeda Constellation" should be capitalized thus. --Boson (talk) 14:02, 8 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, the rule does state that "Galaxy" should be capitalized. Yes, "Andromeda Constellation" would also be uppercased, just like the example suggests That constellation is called simply "Andromeda" or "the Chained Maiden"[27], so, unlike the galaxy, "constellation" is not part of the proper name. These rules follow the rules at the astronomy naming convention, which in turn follows the rules of the International Astronomical Union, the international entity responsible for naming celestial bodies.
All our articles in celestial bodies already follow these rules. For example, all galaxies are either "Name Galaxy" or "Name (galaxy)", all lowercased titles are all for types of galaxies like spiral galaxy. --Enric Naval (talk) 20:39, 20 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • Replace contentious examples with examples where there is little or no disagreement. This is a no brainer. LK (talk) 09:34, 11 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]

The existing statement is not contested: Names of planets, moons, asteroids, comets, stars, constellations, and galaxies are proper nouns and begin with a capital letter: "The planet Mars can be seen tonight in the constellation Gemini, near the star Pollux. The problem comes up when trying to decide whether to combine the generic terms "comet" and "galaxy" and stuff like that with the name part into a compound "proper noun". Yes, the astronomy buffs, as represented by the IAU, have a convention to do so. But we haven't got any widespread consensus (among more than the astro buffs) to adopt that style in WP. Until we do, we shouldn't be adding examples that suggest that we have that agreement. In the mean time, majority usages shows lower case, indicating the IAU style has not caught on in general usage ([28], [29], [30]), so why would we even consider going that way, given WP's MOS:CAPS? Dicklyon (talk) 21:26, 20 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Dick, I've restored the examples to the astronomy section. You indicated in your edit summary that the 'lack of consensus was abundantly clear' in the RM, which is patently incorrect. The discussion was heavily leaning in favour of keeping the capitalisation when you withdrew your move request, and the closer of the discussion after you did so even stated that there appeared to be no chance that your proposed change would gain consensus. Please don't misrepresent the consensus in this way - your request failed to gain consensus to change the capitalisation, it did not establish a lack of consensus to keep the capitalisation.
You and Tony seem intent on changing this area of Wikipedia. In the past you have changed the MOS without consultation, then pointed at your change in move requests as though it had always been there. When your move requests fail, you wait a few days until attention has moved elsewhere and then try to make changes to the MOS, pointing (falsely) at the results of your failed move requests as evidence that things should be changed.
Enough. The consensus on astronomical topics is and has always been to follow the capitalisation guidelines of the IAU. It has nothing to do with 'astronomy buffs' and the consensus built on Wikipedia thus far extends beyond 'astronomy buffs' as you allege above. I find it dishonest that despite seeing consensus (and in strong numbers) on astronomy articles for this convention, you brought it up here with only a small handful of people commenting, and used that as justification to change the article. Consensus doesn't have to be built on the specific page being altered, the consensus established in astronomy articles on naming is relevant and valid to this MOS page. If you insist on changing this text, I would strongly suggest you open an RFC - people knowledgeable in this field may not have the MOS on their watchlist, but are absolutely entitled to express their views. TechnoSymbiosis (talk) 00:44, 21 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]
And let me be clear: in this discussion right now, there are three people supporting the change and two opposing. This is not consensus. Per BRD, the text was removed, it was restored, now it must be discussed before being removed again. TechnoSymbiosis (talk) 00:46, 21 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]
TS, I withdrew my RM because it was clear that there was no consensus. The counts had drifted from about 16:15 to 16:17 or something like that, which is certainly still in the "no consensus" territory. Your characterization of the issue is patently unfair. I advertised my changes on several relevant talk pages and made the RM as a test case. Please assume good faith. And if there's a consensus to follow IAU, please do point out the discussion that shows that. Dicklyon (talk) 04:28, 21 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]
As I commented in the "comet and galaxy examples" section, the RM was 1-3 against moving. --Enric Naval (talk) 12:07, 21 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I'd like to see the IAU matter ratified (or discarded) through a specific RFC, actually, so that there's one place we can point to when the question is raised again. Existing discussions on the matter are scattered across a variety of topics and could be characterised as a 'trend', but it's really something that needs to exist centrally, much like the IUPAC naming conventions are mentioned for chemistry articles. I think such an RFC would belong here (and be mentioned in the MOS section for astronomical terms if accepted), but certainly WP Astronomy should be brought in since it's something that precisely overlaps with their scope. Thoughts? TechnoSymbiosis (talk) 05:05, 21 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I agree. The current scheme of astronomy just ignoring the principles of the MOS causes a lot of thrashing. We should get an exception ratified if that's what we need, or go back to following the MOS principles. Dicklyon (talk) 18:16, 22 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Where did these examples come from?

The contested examples were added in Dec. 2008, in this diff, the day after Christmas, in a month when the talk page had no edits at all. Seriously, is there any reason to think there was some consensus to add these, under summary "clarification"? Dicklyon (talk) 04:36, 21 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]

It's impossible to know if the matter wasn't discussed at WikiProject Astronomy or some other appropriate venue. I'll take you up on your suggestion of assuming good faith and assume that the paragraph's addition was approved of, and that its existence in the MOS for three years, including discussions specifically about it, gave some degree of implicit consensus over time. I don't mind if current consensus is to remove it, as long as that is indeed what current consensus is, and my main issue here is that the people that edit in this area that are knowledgeable and likely to understand the nuances better than others aren't aware that a change like this is even being proposed. We've got a few ways to try to figure out what consensus is, as well as some alternatives that might remove the need to debate that specific paragraph altogether (see my comment on an IAU RFC above). TechnoSymbiosis (talk) 05:16, 21 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Dicklyon's last edit is acceptable to me, although I am tempted to stick a "citation needed" tag behind "popular usage". --Enric Naval (talk) 18:11, 22 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]
(edit conflict) (I am also tempted to count how many of the opposers in the Halley's Comet's RM were from WikiProject Astronomy.) --Enric Naval (talk) 18:11, 22 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Since we're not in article space, I suppose a citation to some original research that supports the assertion might be in order. Feel free to call for if you like. Dicklyon (talk) 18:13, 22 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]
One problem is that usage is determined by "usage in reliable sources", not by "popular usage". And people at Halley's RM were saying that Science & Telescope Sky & Telescope was the most reliable source, and that it capitalized the name. --Enric Naval (talk) 18:30, 22 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Not all popular usage is reliable, true. But things in books are generally considered reliable. The tendency of specialists to capitalize their own subject matter, when general authors do not do so, has been commented on many times, and is well represented in the astronomy magazines (though the name you quoted is not one) and is enshrined in the recommendations of the IAU. The question for WP is thus whether to follow the general practice, or the practice of specialist communities. Recall the RM on Halley's comet was winning until Greg came in and started throwing around his weight as long-time serious amateur astronomer (asserting: I’ve been an amateur astronomer for 40 years. Indeed, there is mixed use of “Halley's Comet” and “Halley's comet.” But when it comes to deciding what is most-proper, encyclopedic practices, one must look towards the quality of the sources. Best practices within this discipline has been to follow the lead of the International Astronomical Union.). But it has not generally been WP policy to adopt recent specialist org recommendations as "best practices", except within some projects. Most of the votes to capitalize were from astronomers, I think. Is this sort of "local consensus" the way forward? Or not? Let's decide. Dicklyon (talk) 20:57, 22 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]
(err, I meant Sky & Telescope) WP's practice is to follow the usage in reliable sources, per WP:COMMONNAME, which only makes exceptions for ambiguity, accuracy and neutrality. Our naming convention doesn't mention "popular usage" anywhere, it only mentions usage in RS. Greg said that the usage in the best reliable sources in astronomy is to follow IAU's rules. Now, if you are arguing that we should follow the usage of the less reliable sources over the more reliable ones.... --Enric Naval (talk) 11:26, 23 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]
WP:COMMONNAME is a naming policy, not a styling policy. But even if you copy the capitalization style from reliable sources instead of following the top-line principles at MOS:CAPS, your argument loses, because "Halley's comet" and "Andromeda galaxy" are more common in reliable sources. You have to promote Sky & Telecope as more important than Science, Nature, Montly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Astronomy and Astrophysics, Icarus, Reviews in Modern Astronomy, The Astrophysical Journal, etc., and above all the books and articles that are independent of the astonomers, to get your result. The local consensus on the "Halley's Comet comes from the IAU recommendation, not from actual usage. Dicklyon (talk) 15:44, 23 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]
You already made that argument in the RM, and Greg L. already addressed it[31][32]. You choose to ignore that two other encyclopaedias also capitalize the name. Your claims of usage in astronomy books are against the evidence I found in my searches, which are detailed in the RM. I suspect that a detailed search of google scholar (clicking in the links and reading the abstracts, instead of simply reading the text in the search results page) wouldn't find overwhelming usage of any of the two forms. And finally, you say that capitalization is against popular usage, but an editor complained in the RM that there was no evidence for popular usage by laymen[33], and you indeed didn't provide any such evidence. --Enric Naval (talk) 10:58, 2 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Reverted imperative

The acknowledgement of the IAU caps style in astronomy was converted to an imperative here. I think it is rare for the MOS to have imperatives at all; it should be about advice, guideance, and statement of a preferred style, per consensus. To have an imperative where there's not consensus seems particularly wrong. Dicklyon (talk) 18:49, 29 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Really? The main MOS is largely and extensively written in the imperative. This is just following that. And there was more than one reason for that edit, namely the need to spell out the IAU initialism on its only use on the page. I object to the previous phrasing; it does more than waffle, it serves to undermine the instruction, with its use of "despite". Seems that someone doesn't like the exception and is putting in something to weaken it. (Not saying you personally, just that that's how it reads, which doesn't work). oknazevad (talk) 04:40, 2 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Imperative language is used fairly extensively through the MOS, including on this page. "Use sentence-style capitalization", "avoid writing with all capitals", "do write in all capitals for acronyms and initialisms", as well as any sentence in the format "X should be Y". The only fundamental difference between "Use the IAU for capitalisation guidance" and "The IAU should be used for capitalisation guidance" is their relative strength, both are still imperative statements. TechnoSymbiosis (talk) 04:40, 3 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]
What an entirely unintended timestamp coincidence... TechnoSymbiosis (talk) 04:42, 3 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

socialism/Socialist communism/Communist libertarianism/Libertarian

one is the ideology, the other refers to a person, should both be capitalized, or only the person? Darkstar1st (talk) 07:51, 11 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]

  • Neither should be capitalized. That's the way I read the style guide. It should be capitalized only if it's part of a proper name. e.g. "Union of Soviet Socialist Republics", "Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy". LK (talk) 09:39, 11 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]
A communist is a person with communist ideas, whereas a Communist is a member (or a supporter) of the Communist Party; a socialist is a person with socialist ideas, whereas a Socialist is a member (or a supporter) of the Socialist Party: a libertarian is a person with libertarian ideas, whereas a Libertarian is a member (or a supporter) of the Libertarian Party (which, BTW, is not quite “libertarian” in the standard non-US meaning of the word). ― A. di M.​plé​dréachtaí 20:18, 11 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Where does the assertion that members of a political movement or party should be named with a capitalised epithet. So I'm a Free Trader or a Fascist because I pay a membership fee to political parties of those names? Socialist with an S invites mistaken attribution, for example. Which socialist party? Can one be a Socialist but not a socialist (a rat in the ranks)? Tony (talk) 10:42, 30 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Of course one can. The Militant Tendency's criticism of Tony Blair was pretty much that he might be a Socialist, belonging as he did to a member party of the Socialist International, but was not a socialist. Note that the previous sentence would require translation into English without the M and the T.
Capitalization exists, mostly, to make such distinctions. Even farther apart, a free trader engages in commerce; a Free Trader holds certain economic views. JCScaliger (talk) 14:46, 19 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Edit warring

There's currently a very slow-moving edit war going on over this bit of text. It was reported at WP:AN3, and I declined to block anyone for now, but there has been yet another revert since then, so let this be a warning to all users involved: this simply can't be allowed to go on and on indefinitely. I would recommend that you all refrain from reverting each other entirely, and pursue methods of dispute resolution if need be. Remember that thinking you're reverting disruption, thinking you're supported by consensus, or thinking you're "right" in an edit war does not excuse you, and neither does avoiding 3RR. Let's try to voluntarily modify our behavior and avoid further disruption. Thanks, Swarm X 01:40, 21 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]

For the record, that 'yet another revert' was mine, though I haven't participated in this particular edit war and wasn't aware there was one. I've left a message above for discussion on the matter, in any case. TechnoSymbiosis (talk) 02:20, 21 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Swarm, I wonder whether you feel in a position to bring the parties together, perhaps on a subpage, to find a resolution, or at least to find common territory and calm the waters. Tony (talk) 13:58, 23 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Capitalisation of military terms at General of the army (United States) and General of the armies

I'm having a bit of bother with what started out as general house keeping. Would somebody who understands the capitalisation (or non-capitalisation) of military ranks as laid down in WP:MilTerms do me a favour and pass by at the talk pages, Talk:General of the army (United States) and Talk:General of the armies? I'd be grateful. Shem (talk) 17:52, 23 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Definitely need some neutral editors here. The user moved these pages against a primary source and then engaged in canvassing when his edits were challenged [34]. I'm off Wikipedia until Monday, at the earliest, so I leave this in the hands of others. -OberRanks (talk) 18:41, 23 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]

My much esteemed accuser isn't against a touch of canvassing himself, but we'd both welcome a rush of neutral editors. Shem (talk) 18:52, 23 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Religious doctrines being capitalized in accordance with sources/tradition

There has recently been an RFC started at Wikiproject Buddhism about the capitalization of many Buddhist doctrines in accordance with how they are normally capitalized. The RFC has began, IMO, primiarly due to this wording:

"Doctrinal topics or canonical religious ideas that may be traditionally capitalized within a faith are given in lower case in Wikipedia, such as virgin birth (as a common noun), original sin or transubstantiation."

I am not sure when this was added, but this seems to go against various guidelines that support referring to something as it is commonly called by sources. For example, if we apply WP:COMMONNAME then the article Three Jewels should be capitalized, but according to this policy it should not. I hope I'm not unknowingly opening a can of worms—I did not readily see this being discussed in the archives—but it would seem to me that precedence for capitalization should follow how sources usually capitalize the subject.AerobicFox (talk) 01:44, 31 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]

This can of worms has been open for a long time. COMMONNAME doesn't have much to say about styling. MOS:CAPS says we only capitalize proper names. The problem is in determining what's a proper name. Sources are important here, but counting is not typically going to predict or determine the consensus answer. In this case, capitalization is more common, but lower case is not rare, so WP's house style has plenty of precedent and should not be a problem. But some editors will disagree; such is wiki-life. Dicklyon (talk) 07:08, 31 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]
WP:CAPS: "Wikipedia avoids unnecessary capitalisation". Tony (talk) 07:26, 31 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Laws, comets, eras, and suchlike

I really don't understand the reluctance to treat terms that are clearly used as proper nouns, as proper nouns. Murphy's Law is a named maxim; the name of the maxim is "Murphy's Law", and as a name, it is (and should be treated as) a proper noun. Same with Elizabethan Era and Halley's Comet and many other named instances of specific entities. It is completely incomprehensible to me to treat these names as common nouns, no matter how many style guides recommend against it. Powers T 18:37, 13 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

This tradition of English usage seems to date from at least the Elizabethan era, and MOS:CAPS says that we avoid unnecessary capitalization. Capitalization is necessary for proper names, and most sources capitalize more than WP does, so a lack of capitalization in broad usage is pretty good evidence against interpretation as proper name. If you admit a difference between a name and a proper name, it's less confusing; when a particular instance of generic object is named for a person or something, it is traditional to not include the generic as part of a proper name; the name is better thought of as a description, as the law articulated by Murphy, or the comet described by Halley, or the era of Elizabeth. Dicklyon (talk) 19:28, 13 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Similary, for things like the Mesozoic era, usage has been moving toward more capitalization in recent decades, but has only reach about 50%. This is strong evidence that capitalization is not necessary, and therefore WP style is to not jump on that particular bandwagon, right? When such a term gets accepted as a proper name, the evidence shows it, like for Korean War]. Dicklyon (talk) 20:25, 13 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Sources already treat those names as proper nouns. Claiming that they might stop doing so in some far future is WP:CRYSTAL. --Enric Naval (talk) 21:52, 13 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I'm intrigued, Powers and Enric Naval. Do you also think that "second law of thermodynamics" is a proper noun? (Well, first: do you think it is a noun? Why?) Do you think that these are "proper nouns":
  1. second law of thermodynamics
  2. law of the excluded middle
  3. principle of maximum entropy
  4. fallacy of quoting out of context
  5. cherry picking
  6. post hoc ergo propter hoc
  7. Kullback–Leibler divergence
  8. Pontryagin's minimum principle
  9. denying the correlative
  10. common practice period
  11. Newton's law of universal gravitation
  12. law of universal gravitation
How do you decide? Is each of those titles a "noun"? Please list the ones you would capitalise (like this: "Fallacy of Quoting out of Context"), and explain.
Additional question for both of you, but especially for Enric: why do we have MOS at all (and why do you contribute to its development), if in your view the drift of diverse practice in sources governs these matters directly?
NoeticaTea? 22:16, 13 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Since a noun is a class of word, we should probably use the term "proper name" when talking about the above, which are noun phrases. --Boson (talk) 23:25, 13 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]
In most of those cases, I can't really say without doing a fair bit of research, Noetica. It depends on whether the phrase operates as a name (i.e., a discrete semantic unit that uniquely (within a particular scope) identifies a specific entity) or as a simple descriptive noun phrase. "Murphy's Law", for instance, is the name of a particular axiom, and alternative ways of phrasing (e.g., "the 'law' coined by Murphy") are rarely used. "Cherry picking", on the other hand, is just one descriptive phrase of several that are used for a specific fallacy. Also, compare and contrast "Elizabethan Era" with "Shakespearean times". One is a well-defined, named period of time; the other is a general reference to a vague period of time that could be described in a number of ways. Powers T 02:22, 14 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Elizabethan era is already downcased on WP. Tony (talk) 14:31, 14 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I'm aware of that; you may have noted that I mentioned it in my initial comment at the top of this section. Powers T 21:00, 14 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Eras, theorems, models, laws, theories: these should be upcased only if there's a compelling reason there might otherwise be ambiguity. I can't see any other possible meaning for Elizabethan era, can you? Tony (talk) 07:02, 15 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Powers, you come here making a claim that something is really simple:

"I really don't understand the reluctance to treat terms that are clearly used as proper nouns, as proper nouns. Murphy's Law is a named maxim; the name of the maxim is "Murphy's Law", and as a name, it is (and should be treated as) a proper noun."

But when asked how you decide, with a dozen clearly enumerated examples, you say "In most of those cases, I can't really say without doing a fair bit of research." You then cherry-pick "cherry picking" as a supposedly easy negative instance. But in fact, as used in the linked article it names a definite fallacy just as surely as "fallacy of quoting out of context" does, and just as surely as "Abhyankar–Moh theorem" names a theorem. Why is one easy, and not another? I repeat also: Are these items even nouns, let alone "proper nouns"?

Let's look at the criterion you would use in researching these things:

"It depends on whether the phrase operates as a name (i.e., a discrete semantic unit that uniquely (within a particular scope) identifies a specific entity) or as a simple descriptive noun phrase."

Well, "cherry picking" is a discrete semantic unit that uniquely (within a particular scope) identifies a specific entity, right? It also is a simple descriptive noun phrase, employed metaphorically. Are we to assume that there are only two mutually exclusive possibilities? Why? And why is simplicity important, and what counts as simplicity for your criterion? Isn't "Elizabethan era" a simple descriptive noun phrase, as well as a discrete semantic unit that uniquely (within a particular scope) identifies a specific entity?

I will press you to give an analysis for these four, so that we can get some idea of what on earth you trying to tell us:

  1. Newton's law of universal gravitation
  2. law of universal gravitation
  3. structure theorem for finitely generated modules over a principal ideal domain
  4. Cauchy's integral formula

NoeticaTea? 07:42, 15 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

We had already agreed that scientific laws are lowercased in sources. We are talking about fictitious laws, comets, and other proper names of specific entities. --Enric Naval (talk) 11:48, 15 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I don't agree with that, either. If the names of these entities are treated as names, they should be capitalized. If they're merely descriptive, then they should be lowercased. For Noetica's four examples: #1 could go either way, since it's descriptive and you could rephrase it a number of ways. #2 is the same. #3 is purely descriptive; it would be odd to see it capitalized. #4 is really hard for me to say, as I'm finding the literature a bit over my head... I'd say it could probably go either way, but you could make an argument for using either capitalization exclusively. Powers T 15:05, 15 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]
When you can make an argument for it going either way, then it's pretty clear that capitalization is not necessary, so WP style is to not capitalize. It would be a major disruptive change of WP style to start capitalizing things like "Cauchy's integral formula" or "Newton's law of universal gravitation", which by the way are seldom capitalized in sources except in headings. Similarly, a huge number of reliable sources find it unnecessary to capitalize Murphy's law. Dicklyon (talk) 23:58, 15 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Wikipedia's guideline is fundamentally flawed in that it fails to define what 'unnecessary' is. Nine sources that capitalise and one that doesn't is not sufficient to establish 'unnecessary', as has been argued by some editors in the past. What constitutes 'unnecessary' varies from dialect to dialect and field to field. It's not possible to make one rule that applies to everything, each dialect or field of study is entitled to define what their capitalisation standards - and as such, what is unnecessary and what is - themselves. In this respect I have long argued that since individual interpretation is subjective, we should apply either the standard of official industry bodies, or in their absence WP:COMMONNAME to matters of capitalisation. TechnoSymbiosis (talk) 01:30, 16 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]
TS, that principal guideline is not as flawed as you suggest. Sure, it could be abused in the way you have outlined; but that does not make it worthless by any means. It expresses a clear preference for lower case, when a choice is to be made between plausible alternatives. What are plausible alternatives? First of all, those supported by other Wikipedia style guidelines (or at least by the intent that is discernible in them); and second, those that are found in relevant reliable sources. Usually these two criteria will be in accord. When they are not, Wikipedia's style guidelines trump "reliable sources". Why would we have them, if they did not?
Some vagueness in the mention of necessity is perfectly understandable. Probably inevitable, in fact; necessity takes a good deal of formal regimentation at the best of times, and comes in many philosophical flavours. The principle is not vacuous; it contrasts sharply and usefully with this alternative: "Wikipedia prefers capitalisation whenever a half-believable case can be made for it." That is the principle many seem to prefer at RM discussions these days. We could wish them to respect the guidelines instead.
Our first principle has to be a quick and memorable summation. That's the way with first principles. The later, wordier details do the rest of the work.
NoeticaTea? 05:04, 21 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I disagree that Wikipedia's guidelines should trump verifiable real world practice. Capitalisation in particular is something that can alter the meaning, intention or reception of a word, and official bodies and reliable sources are typically the best qualified to understand such nuances and choose capitalisation accordingly. On simplicity, which do you think is easier to convey? "Use standard English capitalisation style - unless it's k.d.lang in which case it's okay to have all lowercase - unless it's iPod or eMarketing in which case it's okay to have the first letter lowercase but the second letter has to be a capital - unless it's a title in which case capitalise it if it's a prefix but downcase it if it's a suffix or in the middle of a sentence - unless it's certain scientific exceptions like 'abelian group' which can be downcased - unless it's a season in which case it should be downcased but if it's in a name it should have an uppercase first letter - unless - unless - unlses", or "Use the capitalisation style used either by official representative bodies for the field in question, or in their absence, the majority of good quality reliable sources"? TechnoSymbiosis (talk) 22:48, 21 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]
It's interesting that you want the style of "official representative bodies for the field in question" to trump common usage, but you won't grant wikipedia the same right to set their own style. Personally, I think that's backwards. There are very good reasons for WP to adopt a style that emphasizes clarity, meaning, and readability, over the common casual and official usages that over-capitalize words they like to emphasize or reify, or that drop hyphens from compounds that are so familiar in a field that clarifying their meaning has become unimportant, and things like that. That's why we have a manual of style. Dicklyon (talk) 23:38, 21 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I'm fine with common usage trumping official usage in some cases. Our adoption of the IUPAC spelling for chemical names drastically reduced the amount of pointless discussions about aluminium vs aluminum because we have something concrete to point to. Overcapitalisation is not a recognised problem in fields that have official bodies (like chemistry or astronomy). We have a manual of style for a lot of reasons, and it's a guideline and not a policy for some very good reasons too. TechnoSymbiosis (talk) 23:43, 21 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]
TS, in very many cases "reliable sources" are hopelessly muddled and indecisive. Look at this current RM, where editors themselves are bamboozled, and need correction for the very sources they cite. In fact, I am ready to change my vote there. But the point is that it can only be settled rationally by appeal to the correct Wikipedia guideline, which so far has not surfaced in the discussion.
If any Wikipedia guideline is not rationally supported, and lacks sound precedent in the world of quality publishing out there, that guideline can be challenged and revised. That is how CMOS operates (read their prefatory notes, at each new edition), and New Hart's Rules, and every other well-managed guide to style or manual of style. Wikipedia's is one of those influential manuals. The fact that opinion differs, the fact that sources do all sorts of things – none of that is surprising. We do not throw up our hands and yield to the tide of uncertainty and chaos. Interested and competent editors collaborate to fashion sound recommendations; and good citizens of the Project respect the resulting guidelines.
NoeticaTea? 00:17, 22 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]
The sources you decry as confused, uncertain and chaotic are the very same sources we rely on for providing us with content. We have reasonably effective policies in place already on how to deal with conflicting information in sources. There's no evidence to suggest that these same policies can't also be applied towards determining capitalisation. Wikipedia's job is to reflect reliable sources, even if we think they're wrong. It is about verifiability, not truth. There's no harm and significant gain (in terms of reduction of red tape and streamlining of decision-making processes) to the project in using capitalisation based on the majority of reliable sources (something one might consider fairly trivial to the main objective of sharing information) given that the exact same standard of inclusion governs our use of content (something I'm sure you'd agree is far more relevant to the project's goals). There is no justifiable reason why our style guideline should be stricter and more convoluted than our content policies. TechnoSymbiosis (talk) 00:54, 22 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

But TS, we need to be clear about the domain of the present discussion. Sure: reliable sources are used for content. That's always been the point of invoking them. But this discussion at a talkpage is (obviously!) concerned with use of capital letters, and in that and other style matters the sources that are reliable for content are often inept. At the very least, they vary among themselves if not within themselves (see the RM I link above, for two cases of this last). You write:

"There's no evidence to suggest that these same policies can't also be applied towards determining capitalisation. Wikipedia's job is to reflect reliable sources, even if we think they're wrong."

Really? On the contrary, there is. Again, look at the wildly conflicting styling in many sources that are drawn on for content. In fact, the very idea that verifiability and truth are apt at all in matters of style is ill-founded. Well, it is both verifiable and a fact that a certain source uses lower case or upper case for a certain term. But so what? The source does not make that choice "truly" or "verifiably"! It simply makes a choice – often irrationally, often inconsistently.

TS, I fear you have fallen victim to a very pervasive category error. Content and style work quite differently. Content can be true, or verifiable; style, in its essence, cannot be either.

"There's no harm and significant gain (in terms of reduction of red tape and streamlining of decision-making processes) to the project in using capitalisation based on the majority of reliable sources (something one might consider fairly trivial to the main objective of sharing information) given that the exact same standard of inclusion governs our use of content ..."

There is harm in what you propose. Note the categorial distinctions I have just made. If Wall Street Journal is equipoised between "LEGO Group" and "Lego Group", and another source that is fantastic for content has only "Lego Group", while the company calls itself "LEGO Group", hand-waving in the direction of "reliable sources" is rather to be read as drowning. Therefore we have guidelines; and they do settle the matter, along rational industry-best-practice lines.

"... (something I'm sure you'd agree is far more relevant to the project's goals)."

So what if content is more "relevant" than style? Here the topic is style, and we give it its due.

"There is no justifiable reason why our style guideline should be stricter and more convoluted than our content policies."

That's way off the mark. Content disputes are settled by a concurrence of reliable sources, by verifiability and a few straightforward principles. But wresting good style out the chaos – style that will work in the unique Wikipedia experiment – is not so easily achieved. There is no direct precedent; and the excellent indirect ones (CMOS, New Hart's, ACS Style Guide, CBE Manual) are all very complex. Here there is the added difficulty of web-based collaborative editing by volunteers. Why should we think it easy, to fashion guidelines for such a project? Yet it must be done.

NoeticaTea? 01:27, 22 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

There's no problem with using the MOS for general style matters like number and date formatting, paragraph and section guidance, suggestions for active and passive voice in differing situations and so on. Capitalisation differs in that it is not exclusively a matter of style. As I've detailed a few times, capitalisation, particularly of names, alters their meaning. Meaning is information is content, and altering the meaning of a name contrary to its usage in reliable sources is a violation of our policies.
The meaning of the 'i' in iPod is what necessitated an exception to the rule. The same for the singers 'k.d. lang' and 'will.i.am'. Halley's Comet (denoting the name of a unique entity) is meaningfully different to Halley's comet (denoting possession of a common entity). A reasonable individual would tend to surmise that if a rule has an excess of exceptions, it may need to be rewritten, and I believe that's the case here. Given that these carry meanings that would be altered if their capitalisation were changed, it is not reasonable to treat them as matters of mere style, nor to apply a generic style guide to them. As long as a particular rendition in such cases is carried by a majority of reliable sources, it is Wikipedia's job to reflect that rendition as verifiable and meaningful. Altering it is not an acceptable option. TechnoSymbiosis (talk) 02:22, 22 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]
And with respect to your comment regarding how easy or difficult it is to formulate a general guideline for style, effective solutions are, with few exceptions, simple solutions. The more complex a solution becomes, the more open it is to individual interpretation and the more frequently flaws in that solution appear. Wikipedia's MOS is not nearly as elegant a solution as our content policies are, and having seen our content policies applied to style issues in articles before, I can assure you that it does work, and works quite smoothly. TechnoSymbiosis (talk) 02:28, 22 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]
You could, alternatively, address what I actually say – as I did, in answering your post. Few people in this discussion are actually engaging, or answering questions put to them. Including the initiator of the discussion. It's one thing to pick easy cases that support your view, another to deal fairly with challenges put to you.
So TS, what is the resolution to be in the case of "LEGO Group" versus "Lego Group"? We all know how "iPod" works. That one's too easy. Show us "the" way reliable sources might resolve this other case.

"Altering [that rendition] is not an acceptable option."

So a band likes to use Courier New in presenting its name. Do we keep that? A company insists on a ligature to join "f+f" in its name. Do we keep that? A web entrepreneur insists that her name is to be rendered in italics. Do we respect that? (Not just rhetorical questions. I want answers, with explanations.) If you draw the line, you simply draw it differently from other editors. But Wikipedia as a whole must choose one location for the line; and it has style guidelines that trace that larger line dividing what is to be retained and what may be altered.
As for "Halley's Comet" (or "comet"), what if most sources started doing that one with "comet", but used "Comet" for all the others? Do we track the obscure trajectories of the diverse "reliable sources"? The preference appears to be that we follow IAU guidelines. Very well. Now, suppose an article needs to mention Murphy's Law and the precautionary principle in the same sentence, and compare them. Do we track the dominant choice for each of these (as I have just shown them)? And if the choices change? I think you want guidelines for comets; do you want them for such laws, also? Please tell us why or why not. Murphy's law and the precautionary principle are closely comparable in their semantics and syntax. It is perfectly reasonable to deal with them with similar styling – and to be aware that "Murphy's" is just another modifier like "precautionary". The capital in "Murphy's" has no bearing on the choice made for what follows it, if sound linguistic and stylistic principles are to be understood and followed. Do you think that following "reliable sources" should include emulating their prolific confusion? I don't; and I don't think that the ill-motivated and confused inclination to do so is an easy or responsible way out of genuine stylistic difficulties. We can't evade making our own style choices. Live with it.
NoeticaTea? 03:19, 22 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Your post was predicated on the (mis)understanding that capitalisation is purely stylistic. I explained why that position was incorrect. I don't intend to go in circles with you, Noetica, nor do I plan to debate the smallest of semantics. You resolve the matter of LEGO capitalisation by examining the range of reliable sources and determining (with consensus) a dominant form. There are more sources available than the hypotheticals you referenced. Given that I stated very clearly that I was discussing capitalisation, and that capitalisation affects meaning, it should be clear that my reference to renditions were about capitalisation and as such none of your questions regarding visual effects need response. In the event that you can find an instance where the majority of reliable sources use a specific font in rendering a subject's name that differs from surrounding text, we can examine that in more detail.
Wikipedia already does have a line drawn, as dictated by its policies. Guidelines like the MOS don't override policies, and where conflict between them exists, policies take precedence. Capitalisation alters meaning; meaning is information and thus not purely stylistic. Information must be verifiably accurate to our sources. The rest of your reply (including your distinctly poor form "ill-motivated and confused" comment) isn't worth addressing. We can, and have in the past, addressed style concerns through dominant use in sources, and I will repeat again, very clearly for you, that capitalisation is not a purely stylistic concern to begin with, and thus cannot be governed in a purely stylistic manner. Perhaps you're the one who is having difficulty "living with it". TechnoSymbiosis (talk) 05:31, 22 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]
If capitalisation is not at least primarily stylistic, it is odd that CMOS, New Hart's Rules, and practically every style guide has a sizable chapter devoted to the topic. And it is odd that the major resource for capitalisation on Wikipedia is the very page we are here to discuss: part of the Manual of Style.
I don't want to go in circles either, TS. In fact, I am so tired of useless long debates like this one, which in the time-honoured fashion started with the old appeal to proper "nouns" as the natural bearers of initial capitalisation, with the natural bearers of initial capitalisation being primarily ... proper nouns! To avoid such breathtakingly tight circularity, I ask people what they mean in the first place by "proper noun". And I get no answer that stands up to scrutiny. I get no answer for a number of cases that I present, which would be easy to allocate if the matter were as simple as we were told at the top of this section.
As for the LEGO case, I see that you are insensitive to the issue. Reliable sources disagree sharply; and a decision must be made. In fact there are guidelines to decide that one, if only editors who consider such things were versed in the guidelines. Many editors pick and choose, invoking a guideline if it suits their preconceptions, but ignoring inconvenient others in favour of policy at WP:TITLE, or some other force majeur. Myself, I respect all relevant policies, and all relevant guidelines. I call on others to do that also. We would be in a sorry state if those policies and these guidelines were in conflict; but in fact they are not. With small exceptions that should be fixed, they are beautifully complementary.
Capitalisation affects meaning? Of course it does! Who denies it? So does punctuation, and our major style page WP:MOS has a great deal to say about matters of hyphenation (see WP:HYPHEN), the slash (see WP:SLASH), and certain uses of the en dash (see WP:DASH). None of it conflicts with WP:TITLE (which ignores punctuation), or with any proper consideration of "reliable sources" in determining titles.
I don't know what you intend by this: "including your distinctly poor form 'ill-motivated and confused' comment". Did you really intend no hyphen between "poor" and "form"? Anyway, I take it that you prefer to be pejorative rather than answer genuine questions. If you have a change of attitude, you might like to look through the section and see how genuine and thorny issues are simply not addressed. If you find anything I fail to answer that is asked of me, point it out and I'll be happy to fix that.
NoeticaTea? 06:27, 22 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I have no intention of addressing your strawmen, nor engaging you in detailed conversations of insignificant minutiae, nor in responding to your poor attempt to shift attention for your own pejorative writing onto someone else. If you tired of long discussions, you were more than welcome to address the point that I made rather clearly in every one of my replies here, regarding the informative nature of capitalisation. Instead you enjoyed constructing your strawmen, insisted I reply to them and only addressed the point - too late - in your last post. I'm disappointed with your style of argument here, it's not befitting the image of a considered and intelligent individual you presented in our last discussion. It is, specifically, your style of argument that you have employed here that has dissuaded me from expending any further time speaking to you. Unless that changes, we have nothing further to discuss. TechnoSymbiosis (talk) 22:30, 22 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]
TS, I am confident that both of us can shuffle off any discomfort occasioned by this exchange. You are disappointed? So am I, of course. If you now find it difficult to continue, by all means blame the style rather than address the content squarely, with a view perhaps to learning something – as we all might, if we stay the course. But before we abandon all this as yet another futile and unproductive talkpage deadlock, I will answer a point you have just made:

... you were more than welcome to address the point that I made rather clearly in every one of my replies here, regarding the informative nature of capitalisation.

I wonder what you think this was about:

Capitalisation affects meaning? Of course it does! Who denies it? So does punctuation, ...

And I closed with this:

If you have a change of attitude, you might like to look through the section and see how genuine and thorny issues are simply not addressed. If you find anything I fail to answer that is asked of me, point it out and I'll be happy to fix that.

Well, if that invitation is awkward for you, by all means withdraw. But do so without pretending that I am not answering questions – like Powers, who started all this but left long ago; or Enric, from whom one must never expect a straight answer.
Best wishes to you! Drop in for tea sometime if you like, when conditions are more congenial.
NoeticaTea? 23:43, 22 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Sources consistently capitalize "Murphy's Law" and other fictional laws, but not the names of scientific laws. We should follow the advice of our own manual of style. --Enric Naval (talk) 14:19, 17 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Capitalization of "The Kappa Alpha Society"

I've been going through and doing Wikilinks for Kappa Alpha Society when I noticed that most of the occurrences have the "the" capitalized, as in "While attending University of Toronto, Joe Schmo joined The Kappa Alpha Society". In addition to wikilinking Kappa Alpha Society, I started changing the "The" to "the", however I'm not so sure now. As shown in http://www.ka.org/public5.asp , the group itself will capitalize the "The" in the name. For example on that page is the sentence

It is John Hart Hunter's legacy of constant questioning, constant striving for knowledge, and desire to never stop learning that the members of The Kappa Alpha Society are bound to uphold.

. So this isn't just some editor (generally a consistent IP address, from what I've been table to tell) doing this for a prideful reason, the Society does it. So change to lower case based on WP:MOSCAPS or have an exception?Naraht (talk) 12:31, 16 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Depends on whether "The" is part of the name, like The Beatles. If it's part of the name you will have, for example: "He joined The Kappa Alpha Society" or "looking at The Kappa Alpha Society's membership". If it's not part of the name, then it's always "the".
Looking at 1977's Baird's manual, which I will assume to be reliable, "the" is not part of the name [35] "(...) in the autumn of 1825, the Kappa Alpha Society was formed (...)". According to Fraternities_and_sororities#Greek_letters, the name is formed only by the greek letters, without "the".
The guidance is at WP:MOS#Capitalization_of_.22The.22 and Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style_(music)#Names_.28definite_article.29. --Enric Naval (talk) 12:54, 16 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I called the National office and they confirmed that the full name of their organization includes the "The". What would be an appropriate reference for that, Is the example on the Fraternity website good enough, are the articles of incorporation good enough or is there some sort of secondary source that would be appropriate?Naraht (talk) 20:01, 16 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Typical usage in books uses lower-case "the". I think we should do the same, since this shows that capitalization is not necessary. Dicklyon (talk) 00:28, 22 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, generally we don't cap "the", even if it's part of an organization name. The "The Beatles" example is an exception and has been the cause of "more and bloodier [talk page] wars" than many editors will see in their editorship. And the 'The "The Beatles"' at the start of the previous sentence shows why, eliding the "the" use-mention distinction allows us to talk about the Who, instead of the The Who. Rich Farmbrough, 15:58, 26 November 2011 (UTC).[reply]

General principles

In this edit of May 10 2009, PMAnderson added a "general principles" section with an odd and unilluminating provision of his favorite "follow the sources" sort. There was no discussion or acknowledgment of these "principles". I recommend we put it back more like it was before that, incorporating the specifics there into a section not called "general principles", and removing the "follow" clause that was just part of his campaign to de-emphasize WP style. Dicklyon (talk) 15:48, 27 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

As best I can tell, PMAnderson's edit was following a discussion on the capitalisation of Holy Spirit where it was suggested that too many rules (and exceptions to rules) weren't beneficial. I've indicated clearly myself on this page and others that I think we would be better off deferring to sources rather than constructing a tangled web of faulty rules and their necessary exceptions. It may be worth noting that while we refer to (and in some cases revere) the CMOS quite often, its own authors tend to emphasise that a style guide is just a guide, and when it doesn't fit comfortably with the objectives of the work (such as to convey accurate information, or to reflect common usage), it should be ignored. Wikipedia's style guide is no different in this respect, and we should be careful not to have our faces so close to the page as to lose sight of the bigger picture. It's easy to get caught up in the technicalities of trivialities, when effort spent there could be better spent elsewhere.
So in short, I support PMAnderson's edit being kept, at this point. TechnoSymbiosis (talk) 23:26, 1 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]
But we already had the most important general principle in the lead: "Wikipedia avoids unnecessary capitalization. Most capitalization is for proper names, acronyms, and initialisms." His addition of a "general principles" section to say "Wikipedia does capitalize initial letters of proper nouns, and often proper adjectives. In doing this, we follow common usage, and when uncapitalized forms are the normal English usage (abelian group, k.d. lang), we follow common usage." is just confusing. What is its point? Dicklyon (talk) 00:16, 2 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]
There does seem to be some redundancy there, you're right. I'd have no problem with the redundant text being refactored out of the paragraph, though removing it altogether would also remove information that is not otherwise present in the surrounding text, being: "In doing this, we follow common usage, and when decapitalized forms are the normal English usage (abelian group, k. d. lang), we follow common usage". As I have fairly strong opinions on how Wikipedia should treat this area, I don't think I'm in the most neutral position to propose a reworded paragraph, but I'm happy to comment if you have proposed rewording yourself. TechnoSymbiosis (talk) 00:29, 2 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Techno, the "tangled web" of (usually inconsistent) practices outside will be adopted into WP itself if the sources themselves are not balanced by the need to maximise consistency throughout the site. Decisions need to balance several things, only one of which is the range of uses out there. If we took the "do as you please if you've got one major source to back you up" approach, we wouldn't need much of a style guide at all: WP's usage would be all over the place. This is what Mr Anderson wanted—essentially to give the responsibility to local editors of each article, for almost all stylistic decisions. This would be chaotic and would significantly reduce WP's authority. Tony (talk) 04:09, 2 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]
That's the thing; we consult sources, and we use what we find, but we don't always "follow" them. Maybe we can come up with a wording that we can all accept. I'd start to re-uniting the lead, getting rid of the superfluous "general principles" section that snuck in without any discussion. Maybe the lead should be more like this:
  • Wikipedia avoids unnecessary capitalization. Most capitalization is for proper names, acronyms, and initialisms. Wikipedia relies on usage in sources to determine what is a proper noun; words and phrases that are consistently capitalized in sources are treated as proper nouns and capitalized in Wikipedia. A few names and words based on names, however, are consistently lower case in sources, and therefore are lower case in Wikipedia (abelian group, k.d. lang).
I've taken out the advice to "consult the style guide on proper names" as there's nothing there about determining what's a proper name (it's about deciding which name to use). And I would omit the old bit on regional differences, as I don't believe there's anything to it. What say? Dicklyon (talk) 05:12, 2 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]
As the guideline currently stands, there is ambiguity – and one that is quite a "signature". I very much agree with what's in the lead: "Wikipedia avoids unnecessary capitalization. Most capitalization is for proper names, acronyms, and initialisms." I've also noticed there are corners of WP that are inflicted with "Capitalisationitis" with various degrees of entrenchment. All I can say at this point is that if there are any sources out there – and I mean any "proper" source – that do not use capitalisation for a given construction, it is by definition "unnecessary capitalisation" and ought to be downcased within our walls. We don't then need a "general principle" to follow the source. --Ohconfucius ¡digame! 07:28, 2 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Using one source, "any source" as you say, in the face of tens or hundreds of sources to the contrary to justify your definition of "unnecessary capitalisation" is not in the slightest manner a reasonable interpretation of Wikipedia's guideline on the matter. I'm reasonably confident that if you were to RFC that line for clarification, the consensus would not support your interpretation. TechnoSymbiosis (talk) 22:10, 4 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I agree; one source is seldom enough to be definitive. That's why I used the "consistently" term, which was originally proposed here by DGG if I recall correctly. It doesn't try to say how many it takes, but suggests that there's an obvious source-based answer when sources are consistent, and an obvious non-necessity to capitalizalize when sources are inconsistent. There will still be times when editors disagree on which side of the boundary things are on, but it's not at 1 nor at simple majority. Dicklyon (talk) 22:52, 4 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Forgot to note, Dicklyon, your proposed change seems reasonable. The wording on using sources for proper nouns seems restrictive (there are cases where acronyms only get an initial capital or none at all, for instance) but it seems like a good middle ground. TechnoSymbiosis (talk) 22:16, 4 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Feel free to add something about acronyms, to to loosen it up, whichever works better there. But let's don't try to get it all into the lead. Dicklyon (talk) 22:52, 4 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I made the edit; we'll see who balks. Dicklyon (talk) 04:31, 6 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Ok. I'll bite. How do we reconcile this with specific down-casing guidelines like WP:JOBTITLES or WP:DOCTCAPS where it explicitly says we're going against the usual style of sources? Should the intro mention that there are explicit cases where sources are not used? Or perhaps it's simply wrong to say that any noun that's capitalized in sources is a proper noun - maybe it's capitalized for some other reason (tradition, convention, puffery). Jojalozzo 04:35, 6 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I don't see where it says that's against sources; aren't those more just examples/clarifications of the principle? There certainly are many capitalizations in sources for reasons other than proper nouns; are there cases we need to clarify where sources are consistently capitalized but we're still sure they're not proper? Might be, but it would be hard for me to go that far. Dicklyon (talk) 04:46, 6 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]
"Doctrinal topics or canonical religious ideas that may be traditionally capitalized within a faith are given in lower case in Wikipedia, such as virgin birth (as a common noun), original sin or transubstantiation."
Also, up-casing common nouns is standard practice in systems of thought to indicate a specific interpretation for terms with the particular system. The MOS says we don't follow the sources there either.
Likewise it is standard practice to up-case common noun phrases that have acronyms to help the reader see how the acronym is derived.
I could probably go on. My understanding of most of the special down-case guidelines is that they indicate exceptions to "rely on sources" guidelines. Jojalozzo 05:03, 6 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Can you find an example that's consistently upper case in sources, but that we prefer in lower case? Certainly virgin birth is not, though it may be capitalized "within a faith". Lots of things are capitalized within the domain of people who care a lot about the thing, but not more generally in sources, and there we don't capitalize; they're not exceptions to the principle. Phrases that are upper only for acronym definition are still not "consistenty" so (unless they're so rare that they never get mentioned except to define the acronym, but I'm not sure I've ever encountered that). Some exceptions where we do capitalize (Halley's Comet) have been spelled out. Dicklyon (talk) 05:50, 6 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Your edit to the lead suggests that we present and discuss exceptions to the principle. I'm not so sure we do; or not in the direction you suggest, anyway. Dicklyon (talk) 05:53, 6 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Joja, the MoS specifically says that we don't upcase initials just because a compound item is abbreviated using caps. On the initial caps with specific technical meanings in a particular field, I'm navel-gazing at systemic functional linguistics, in which Halliday et al. have a specific protocol for upcasing items of a certain technical category. It works ok in their texts, but in a WP article to duplicate this "convention" would require a specific note at the top of the article ... clumsy or laboured, so I'd be inclined to italicise these, our usual fall-back for marking items. This often works for items that are sometimes capped out there, on first mention in a WP article, where we downcase. Tony (talk) 11:17, 6 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Tony: My point is that is if the lead says we should use sources but doesn't say there are exceptions then whenever we try to down case for the special cases, editors will rely on the lead guideline to override the special case guideline. This already happens enough that the new changes will make it worse unless we explicitly provide for exceptions in the lead guideline. Jojalozzo 16:44, 6 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Dick: There are plenty of articles where the special case guidelines are ignored and this is defended by claims about the sources. See how rank is capitalized in most/many articles about armed forces, "pope" in Pope, religious doctrine such as Assumption of Mary and Immaculate Conception, job title in Chief Mechanical Engineer - I could probably fill this endless page :-). You can run these through Google n-gram viewer ([36], [37], [38]) to see that the sources capitalize rank, job titles, religious doctrine when the guidelines say to down-case them, but the real issue is that editors use capitalization in sources to defend their personal preferences when the guidelines clearly tell us to do otherwise. Jojalozzo 16:44, 6 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]
You had a mistake in one ngram link; should be this. In any case, the n-grams all show that sources do not consistently capitalize these, and so we shouldn't either. I understand the problem that people with a particular affinity to a topic will point to majority capitalization to try to justify their position; but that's not the WP style, nor does clarifying that require any statement of exception. I thought you were worrying about things consistently capitalized in sources that we don't capitalize in WP; I'm not convinced that such problems exist, nor that we specify any such exceptions as your lead edit suggests. Dicklyon (talk) 19:42, 6 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I didn't review your other quoted articles, but regarding immaculate conception, I think you may have only skimmed that article. It uses capitalised "Immaculate Conception" when referring to the religious dogma, which is functionally a proper name, and lower-cased "immaculate conception" when using those words in their common meanings (ie. a conception that is immaculate). This is quite consistent with scholarly sources and I (weakly) don't think it needs an explicit exception as we have currently.
There is a delicate balance between consistency and accuracy in situations like these, and it should come as no surprise that, given Wikipedia is an international project with contributors from thousands of cultural backgrounds and language dialects, consistency is not a prime focus of the project. We strive for it where we can, but things like ENGVAR try to emphasise that variation across the project is not only likely but appropriate.
Accuracy, on the other hand, is considerably more important to the project and is the main purpose of a number of our core policies. What our style guide tells editors shouldn't compromise the accuracy of the information we're trying to present. It should be very rare indeed that situations arise where words are consistently capitalised in reliable sources but we don't do the same here, and I'd suggest that in situations like those, it's much more likely that we're in the wrong than everyone else. TechnoSymbiosis (talk) 22:18, 6 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]
By my reading of the MOS for religious doctrine, "immaculate conception" is always down-cased, like "virgin birth". By what basis is one up-cased and the other down-cased?
"Doctrinal topics or canonical religious ideas that may be traditionally capitalized within a faith are given in lower case in Wikipedia, such as virgin birth (as a common noun), original sin or transubstantiation."
Jojalozzo 03:47, 7 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Ah, the key word here is consistently. I didn't fully absorb the meaning of that word when I read it. Let's italicize it.
However:
  • I am concerned that words that are predominantly (rather than consistently) capitalized in sources will be brought under the same general guideline rather than special case guidelines. There is major resistance to down-casing terms that people are used to seeing up-cased but which the MOS avoids up-casing.
  • How do we determine consistency? How many counter examples are needed to show sources are inconsistent?
Thanks, Jojalozzo 03:47, 7 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, the issue is how we determine consistency. As I said above, it's not majority, and it's not a single example, but somewhere in between. Trying to pin that down is probably not a good idea. Dicklyon (talk) 04:35, 7 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • Further to what Joja says: WP articles are a unique genre and demand their own guidelines. Outside usage, I believe, should be just one of a number of criteria that are balanced in our decision-making. In some cases outside usage might loom large; in others, there will be good reasons for overriding it. I agree with the suggestions you've made. And to me, one of the few good reasons to upcase is if there might be ambiguity or confusion with the same term in generic guise, a relatively rare occurrence. Immaculate conception ... no doubt there what it means. Let's remember that in article text there's always the option of italicising the first occurrence of an item. This is usually better than the disruptive (unsmooth) upcasing device employed on every occurrence in an article (since up/downcasing needs to be consistent, wheareas face doesn't). Tony (talk) 04:11, 7 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]
(edit conflict × 2) I'll put this here though it answers Jojalozzo's question above. Immaculate conception is capitalised when it refers to the dogma, which is essentially a formalised declaration, usually in a published form, from the church. In this sense the term functions as the title of a work and would follow title case. As Tony says, the capitalisation difference also helps to distinguish between Immaculate Conception (the dogma) and immaculate conception (the concept). It's my reading of the MOS section on this area that the idea of immaculate conception, even though the church may capitalise it, should be downcased. I don't interpret it as addressing formal titled dogma but rather concepts and ideas. In this sense I would treat an official dogma in the same way as, for instance, a UN resolution, in title-casing it.
Wikipedia articles can certainly be subject to a project style guide, but as the authors of any style guide will tell you, if the guide doesn't fit well with any given use case, ignore it. Style guides are there to help bring consistency to a work that has its own purposes and objectives, never to be a purpose or objective in itself. Wikipedia's purpose is to reflect the world around us. Being accurate but internally inconsistent (eg. color and orange (colour) aren't consistent, but each article is accurate within itself) is more important to the project than being consistent at the loss of some accuracy (eg. what would happen if the iPod exception didn't exist, and we styled Ipod consistently with our other product names).
Forgive the use of analogy, but the MOS is like a paintbrush - it should be used gently and when appropriate. Wielding it with too much force, or treating it as something it isn't, only serves to ruin both the brush and the artwork. TechnoSymbiosis (talk) 04:38, 7 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Dick, in a google search, in amongst the mess of protein/protein, protein protein, protein-protein, and if you please, protein — protein, if I see protein–protein in an article title in PLoS One (highest-profile online biological sciences research journal—very very respected), I almost stop looking down the google search, since the en dash accords with our MoS and a bunch of external style guides. Tony (talk) 04:43, 7 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Cat, looking at the Queen

"Misty the cat regarded the Queen of Sheba uncertainly. The Queen was wearing a fur coat. Cat fur. The Queen looked back at Misty with a considerably more settled gaze." Animal welfare aside, in the example above, does "Queen" refer to an example of the class of people called queens, or is it a short form of the full title? There seems to be no consensus and no uniformity, and in this society of nit-pickets and guerrilla pedants I am astonished that some hard and fast rule hasn't been thrashed out long ago. My preference is to capitalise a title if it clearly refers to a specific person, and this appears to be common usage in the wider world, but here I find a lot of text that reads awkwardly. --Pete (talk) 18:14, 17 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Does anyone care?

I participate in a most of the requested moves associated with capitalization relative to these MOS guidelines. When the evidence in sources supports the interpretation as generic as opposed to proper, I support downcasing or oppose upcasing. But usually there's not more than me and one other person arguing to follow MOS:CAPS, and couple of editors from the domain arguing to capitalize the things that their domain cares about. See Talk:Relative_Strength_Index#Requested_move for an example. Is there really nobody else who cares enough about style to support such things? Should I just give it up and let "local consensus" in each domain set what to capitalize? Dicklyon (talk) 04:10, 28 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Actually, I think I agree with the capitalizers on this one. Lowercase "relative strength index" could be a lot of things. The fact that it's this one particular measure of relative strength, rather than just any old relative strength index, makes it strike me as a proper noun or something close to it. --Trovatore (talk) 04:38, 28 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Sure, it could be, but you'd think that if someone wanted to attack the point of 2/3 lower-case in books, they'd try to find at least one example of a book hit in which the term is not used in the sense of the topic. In the first several pages of book hits, I don't see any. The lead sentence in MOS:CAPS does say we rely on sources, doesn't it? Why all is this stuff about wild hunches making people ignore evidence from sources? Dicklyon (talk) 04:52, 28 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Trovatore, what else could it be? Seriously ... Tony (talk) 06:43, 28 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Well, it could be any sort of numerical measure of relative strength, whatever "relative strength" may be. I'm not a stock guru particularly. Are you claiming that this is the only natural measure of relative strength? --Trovatore (talk) 09:56, 28 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I'm just wondering (i) how the caps would make it more "recognisable" to anyone, whether expert, "familiar" with the area, or normal person; and (ii) whether there's a competing relative strength index. Dick has demonstrated that most writers don't go for the boosterism inherent in the caps and prefer the smoother effect of unmarked lower case. I don't know what else there is to say ... Tony (talk) 11:50, 28 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]
The administrator who closed that discussion does not care a great deal, no. Others give more or less weight to guidelines vs. local consensus. ErikHaugen (talk | contribs) 01:28, 7 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Organism capitalization synch

 – Pointer to related discussion.

I'm working to make sure that WP:Manual of Style#Animals, plants, and other organisms, WP:Naming conventions (capitalization)#Organisms, WP:Naming conventions (fauna)#Capitalisation of common names of species WP:WikiProject Tree of Life#Article titles, WP:Manual of Style/Capital letters#Animals, plants, and other organisms, WP:Naming conventions (flora)#Scientific versus common names, etc., are synched with regard to common name capitalization.

Please centralize discussion at WT:Manual of Style#Organism capitalization synch

— SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ʕ(Õلō)ˀ Contribs. 07:59, 6 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

"Proper nouns", "proper names", and other concerns: amending the lead

I have boldly altered the lead, though I expect that the edit will be rapidly reverted. Before doing that, please consider the change closely and discuss it here. There were serious problems with the old version. [NoeticaTea? 00:14, 7 January 2012 (UTC)][reply]

The old lead:

Wikipedia avoids unnecessary capitalization. Most capitalization is for proper names, acronyms, and initialisms. Where is it not clear if a term is a proper noun, Wikipedia relies on sources to determine; words and phrases that are consistently capitalized in sources are treated as proper nouns and capitalized in Wikipedia.

There are exceptions for specific cases discussed below, such as common names of fauna.

The lead I propose:

Wikipedia avoids unnecessary capitalization. Most capitalization is for proper names, words or phrases derived from proper names, acronyms, initialisms, and titles of persons. Where is it not clear from the provisions on this page whether a word or phrase ought to be capitalized, Wikipedia consults reliable sources.

Problems with the old version
  1. There are differences between proper nouns and proper names, though the terminology is unsettled in the linguistic literature, and style-guidance resources, and dictionaries. The article Proper noun is poor, and does not deal with the difference; but it is the best we currently have, apart from the far more sophisticated article Proper name (philosophy), which also needs work. It is certainly best to speak clearly of proper names in the lead, since that avoids confusions and theoretical uncertainties. For example, by the best current terminology North Carolina is a proper name, but not a proper noun. It contains a proper noun (a kind of word, not a kind of phrase): Carolina; but some proper names do not contain a proper noun, like United Kingdom.
  2. The article Proper noun abounds in such errors. One very relevant example from there:
    "Which nouns are considered proper names depends on the language. For example, names of days and months are considered proper names in English, but not in Spanish, French, Swedish or Finnish, where they are not capitalized."
    Wrong! This perpetuates the hopeless circularity people fall into all the time at RMs: a proper noun is a noun that is capitalised is a proper noun is a ...! Names of days and months are as much proper names in French, Albanian, or Vulcan as they are in English. What differs is the set of conventions for capitalisation of such items. Those conventions are independent of status as a proper name.
  3. These and associated confusions come up again and again, most unproductively in RM discussions. It is remarkable that editors appeal to these notions, without any clear sense of what a proper name is (or proper noun, as they assume is equivalent). For example, there is talk of "proper adjectives"; but there is no such thing, in the regimented terminology of modern linguistics. In "the Kantian system", Kantian is an adjective; but it is not a "proper adjective". It is a plain vanilla adjective that by a convention (not much shared beyond English usage) is capitalised because it is derived from a proper name: Kant. Even more commonly, editors assume that because it is capitalised and truly a noun, Kantian is a proper noun in "he is a Kantian". But no. Similarly for an Australian, a New Zealander, a South Sea Islander. These are noun phrases (NPs).* But they are not proper names and certainly not proper nouns (by the best modern accounts). The old version of the lead is inaccurate and misleading in not covering such capitalisations.
    [* Note added later: Very technically, when stripped of a or an they can be called nominals; but this is not explained at the article Nominal, which uses that term differently. It is unnecessary for the page to be complicated by this term, so I confine myself to a simpler distinction between noun and NP.–Noetica]
  4. The old version gives too much weight to reliable sources. Of course they are important, always. But we have on this page of the Manual of Style a well-articulated set of guidelines to settle appropriate uniform capitalisation practice. There can be no point in having them if they are to be dismissed in favour of "reliable sources". Three crucial points:
    • Sources that are reliable for content are not necessarily reliable for style: neither for internal consistency nor conformity with major style guides.
    • The whole point of a manual of style is to rise above such uncertainties in sources, and specify practices that are appropriate in the new context – which for us means practices appropriate on Wikipedia, given the unique way it is edited (and by whom), and the unique way it is read (by users of English all over the world).
    • Nothing in the proposed version of the lead, or anything I say above, supports unprincipled style innovation on Wikipedia. The current style guidelines, at WP:MOS, on the present page, and elsewhere, give the closest consideration to sources: best-practice contemporary publishing, and the deliverances of dictionaries, and of general and specialised style guides and style manuals. I hope that will continue.

I commend what I see as a vast improvement to the lead. I am hoping for productive non-partisan discussion here, conducted in good order, with good listening and respect. Two special requests:

  1. Please do not complicate the situation by a succession of new drafts to consider, before the one currently on the table has been adequately dealt with. Too often the discussion gets entirely unmanageable when that happens.
  2. Similarly, please by all means either revert the amendment I have boldly put in place (retaining the discussion template) or keep it on the page for the time being. Let's be happy with one or the other, for a little while. It we all jump in and tweak components of it on the page itself, again the discussion gets unmanageable; and we descend into warring. Plenty of time to get things right, here on the talkpage.

NoeticaTea? 00:14, 7 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

  • Support though I disagree about a couple of points in the rationale. ― A. di M.​  00:58, 7 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment. Here’s my concern, Noetica. Wikipedia’s guidelines are not stable. A year from now, a whole new set of editors will be active on our many guideline pages. Some will be descending to Change the World To a New and More Logical One®™© whereas others will want to follow a practice observed by MTV. Even policy guidelines well-cemented by WP:Five pillars like WP:Consensus are currently being revised by a well-intentioned editor who is new to that venue and is endeavoring to modify it so it better suits his worldview.

    By distancing Wikipedia from drawing its guidance by looking towards the RSs, we invite even more of this well-intentioned effort by editors—some of whom haven’t even graduated from high school—to use Wikipedia as a vehicle to help lead by example. Now…

    Though it isn’t an issue over capitalization and was instead an issue of diacritics, I note that at Talk:Crêpe, here, the issue was settled by your exemplary work to discern the best sources to use as guidance. In fact the closing admin, GTBacchus, closed as follows (mentioning you by name):

The result of the move request was: page moved per discussion. In particular, Noetica's excellent and thorough analysis of the sources behind the Google searches establishes that the use of the circumflex is significantly more common in reliable sources addressing this topic, so the COMMONNAME argument is turned right around. This discussion is where I'll probably point people in the future as an example of how Google searches should be treated; that's good work.

I'd also like to give props to ErikHaugen for his grace in fielding quite a lot of criticism in this discussion. I'm grateful for the work you do in closing move requests, Erik. - GTBacchus

My worry is that what you are suggesting makes it even more tempting for budding journalists (read: someone who would like to be a journalist someday but has no advanced education in the discipline as of yet) can try their hand at it. Were that to happen we would soon be falling victim to more time-wasting infighting to reverse the capitalization-equivalent of using “mebibytes” instead of the “megabytes” that is standard for computer industry. We actually used that sort of terminology for three whole years! Dumb stuff can come about amazing fast and persist amazingly long if you give it an excuse. Greg L (talk) 01:28, 7 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

P.S. I hated to write what I did, particularly because your above suggestion is—I think—a paradigm for the tone and content of how these sort of suggestions should be made. Nicely done. Greg L (talk) 02:15, 7 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

  • Support. Noetica's arguments are worthy of a Supreme Court judgement. I'd never thought through the logical distinctions concerning capitalisation, proper names, and proper nouns. Now it is much clearer. Greg, I support your work to stop the mebi- silliness at MOSNUM, but as you know, I believe units and conversions need to be documented in detail in a MOSNUM appendix. This has not yet been set up, and we owe it to editors at large. I don't see the analogy with caps. Tony (talk) 02:53, 7 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
The connection is that those who have good-faith intentions but lack competence come to Wikipedia in hopes of affecting change in how the world works without understanding how the world works. And I’m not alluding to any present company, but to future “youngins” who parachute into Wikipedia on regular occasion.

Wikipedia is a huge amalgam of articles cutting across many disciplines. Literary (capitalization and other) practices that are most professional in one discipline, like automotive, may be different from those used in genetics, biology, archeology, or optics. It’s complex and sometimes our global guidelines should say “look to the most-reliable RSs” rather than pretend that any single set of humans can craft such a complex manual of style in the collaborative writing environment that is Wikipedia.

Since the job of any good encyclopedia is to educate its readers on a subject and properly prepare them for their continuing studies in that discipline, following most-reliable RSs in the respective disciplines best serves the interests of our readership. That’s not to say that “follow the RSs” is the be-all, end-all solution to things. I just find the present language to be a suitable balance and would neither weaken nor strengthen it. Greg L (talk) 03:03, 7 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Greg, I am holding off on detailed responses till we have heard from more editors. I very much appreciate your careful submissions; but my hope is that we can get many views expressed first to tease out a variety of issues, before we move on to the most fine-grained analysis. Your point is well and truly registered! Let's see what others will say.
I have refactored slightly (adding "Comment" in bold to your initial comment). I hope no one will object. It is imperative that we keep a complex discussion readable: for us, but more especially for those who join in later.
NoeticaTea? 03:47, 7 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment – I agree and disagree with both Noetica and Greg L. Does the current version put too much emphasis on sources? I don't think so; the wording (which I added after a discussion where nobody objected) says "words and phrases that are consistently capitalized in sources are treated as proper nouns and capitalized in Wikipedia." Perhaps it was bad to put "treated as proper nouns" since I don't really know what I'm talking about in that department. How about "words and phrases that are consistently capitalized in sources are capitalized in Wikipedia"? I don't know of many cases where application of this principle has resulted in an outcome that I don't like (just Peter Principle). The problem is that people don't apply it, and argue for non-sourced-based capitalization, or they argue for capitalization even when sources are very mixed. How will new and more complicated explanations help? Dicklyon (talk) 05:31, 7 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comments - 1) The immediately previous version is the product of independent editors hacking the consensus version developed a month ago in #General principles. I think it makes more sense to compare the new language to that consensus version since it at least uses complete sentences:

    Wikipedia avoids unnecessary capitalization. Most capitalization is for proper names, acronyms, and initialisms. Wikipedia relies on sources to determine what is a proper noun; words and phrases that are consistently capitalized in sources are treated as proper nouns and capitalized in Wikipedia.

2) I share the concerns of others here that the ability to override the MOS when sources disagree is problematic. However, when the guidelines are not clear (and loopholes abound, especially in those areas where traditional capitalization is at odds with the MOS's minimal caps style), and we refer to sources, I think the previous consensus version's requirement for consistent usage in sources improves the likelihood of resolving disputes: when sources capitalize consistently we have resolution and when sources are not consistent we can move on to other methods of settling the question. The new language does not offer help in dealing with inconsistent capitalization in sources. Jojalozzo 05:48, 7 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support, but... Noetica's corrections to the misuse of "proper" are indisputable, and the lead is much better in this respect. However, I would retain a little more of the original version for absolute clarity:
"... Where is it not clear from the provisions on this page whether a word or phrase ought to be capitalized, Wikipedia consults reliable sources; words and phrases that are consistently capitalized in such sources are capitalized in Wikipedia."
The reason being that otherwise it's not clear whether we are consulting sources such as style guides which say what to capitalize or consulting sources which include the relevant words or phrases to see whether or not they are capitalized. Peter coxhead (talk) 10:46, 7 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Sort of support, but I'm not convinced by the new wording either. "We avoid unnecessary capitalization" sounds too one-sided and slogany as the first sentence of a guideline that's supposed to help solve a variety of delicate problems. The general principle I suppose is that we solve problems by consulting our own style guidance (which in turn is based on that of reliable style guides) and usage in reliable sources, and come to a conclusion based on all of what we find. But no particular need to put anything like that in the lead (here and on every other MoS page). I would just have a lead that says something laconic like "This page contains style guidance concerning the use of capital letters in Wikipedia articles." (We already have the guideline box that says there will be occasional exceptions.)--Kotniski (talk) 14:59, 7 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose - complete rewrite needed. Too slogany, one-sided, etc as per Kotniski. -- cheers, Michael C. Price talk 15:07, 7 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support—I appreciate the technical corrections, but more importantly I think that for stylistic issues like capitalization it is best for us to, where possible, to use a consistent style rather than defer to sources in each case. ErikHaugen (talk | contribs) 16:38, 7 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support, though I am not against a few of the suggestions others have made. The important part is to prefer style consistency for styles, not to prefer inconsistency at whim of "my source is better than your source" sword-waving contests. Quibbles a can be sorted out later. That said, I have to oppose Peter coxhead's wording change, because it will be far too easy to edit-war over it, especially where sources that are very narrowly focused on something consistently do capitalize but equally reliable, more general sources consistently do not. We should always prefer the more general sources, because specialist sources of literally thousands of types uniformly capitalize things that no one else does. Bickering about just one example (bird common names) has already lead to an unbelievable amount of wikistrife for seven straight years. — SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ʕ(Õلō)ˀ Contribs. 19:35, 7 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support. I agree that the additions, removals, and other changes proposed are all beneficial. Here are some points for consideration. Mention by me on this list is not endorsement.
  1. From my Web search for proper adjective, the first result is the Wikipedia article "Proper adjective".
  2. Wiktionary has information at wikt:proper and wikt:proper adjective and wikt:proper name and wikt:proper noun.
  3. One of my bidirectional dictionaries of Latin and English has a section "List of historical and mythological proper Names." [sic] and a separate section "List of geographical Names." [sic].
  4. OneLook Dictionary Search is again accessible (after about 10 days, to my knowledge, during which it appeared that the domain was for sale), with links on each of these pages.
—Wavelength (talk) 20:27, 7 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment - I think that issues with the MOS capitalization are both strategic and tactical. We have a strategy of minimal capitalization that previously allowed override by consistent sources. This new proposal does not allow for such override but provides for the determination of capitalization by sources when the MOS is unclear and I support that since I also have a strong preference for a consistent style across all articles of the project rather than a consistent style for articles and their sources.
However, in my experience, the main reasons for inconsistencies are not that the MOS uses sources for capitalization style but a) the notion that the MOS is just a guideline that we can override when "common sense" (whatever that means - often it seems to be consensus of those most familiar and invested in a topic) leads us to do so and b) most of the sections in the body of this page as well as a diverse array of related capitalization sections of the MOS provide myriad exceptions (or are poorly written to allow for unintended exceptions) offering justification for most any variance from house style that sources support.
I don't know how to address issue (a) where a large majority of editors who are used to a particular capitalization style simply ignore the MOS because it's common sense to use the style they commonly use outside the project.
I think that issue (b) is where the proposed language will fail us since we will still be using sources whenever the exceptions, loopholes and unclear writing allow. Aside from attempting to clean up MOS ambiguities, we should at the least, in cases where the MOS is unclear, only defer to sources when they are consistent. Otherwise the discussion devolves from interpreting the MOS to evaluating sources, analyzing n-gram results, often leading to resolution by deferring to common sense (a) anyway. Instead, I think the lead should a) explicitly address the issue of common sense and b) say explicitly that we will fall back on minimal capitalization as the foundational style when the MOS is unclear and sources are inconsistent. Jojalozzo 23:53, 7 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment. Here are some additional points for consideration.
  1. OnlineStylebooks.com (a stylebook search engine) has search results for proper adjective, listed here.
  2. Language Log has search results for proper adjective, listed here.
  3. LINGUIST List has search results for proper adjective, listed here.
  4. Other-language versions of Wikipedia have guidelines for decisions about letter case.
—Wavelength (talk) 01:49, 8 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Wavelength, Language Log is the most highly respected academic linguists' log that is accessible to all comers. The professional linguists there use terms with great precision. Your linked search of the site is misleading, though I'm sure that was not intended. Like Google, its search facility uses double quotes for phrases; and a search on the phrase "proper adjective" yields no hits. The term is quite informal, and not found in current linguistics. This is confirmed when we alter your linked Google search for LINGUIST List to search for a phrase instead of two independent words. Then there is only one hit: from an anthropologist. A linguist in the same thread makes this relevant comment: "The proper/common distinction is strictly a noun distinction." NoeticaTea? 03:11, 8 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Noetica, you are correct: I did not intend to mislead, and I should have searched for "proper adjective". Incidentally, I use typographical alteration (such as boldface, underscore, or italics) instead of quotation marks to distinguish my search terms from the surrounding text, because quotation marks are sometimes included with the search terms, and I consider the expressions "with the quotation marks" and "without the quotation marks" to be somewhat awkward.
—Wavelength (talk) 20:09, 8 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
There's {{code}} for that, e.g. Search for "proper adjective" -Wikipedia. ― A. di M.​  20:17, 8 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Several methods are effective: boldface, underscore, italics, big text, small text, colors, code tags and template code.
—Wavelength (talk) 01:01, 9 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment as proposer. It is very encouraging to see clearly expressed opinions, presented in good order so that even newcomers can follow the contours of the discussion. I for one am developing a better sense of the main issues.
I suggest that we continue like this, gathering many comments, for two more days from the time of this post. As proposer of the new version of the lead I would then like the opportunity to make a summary response, and to put forward a plan of action for the entire page: one that should meet the genuine concerns of all commenters.
I trust this will be considered a fair procedure.
NoeticaTea? 03:11, 8 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  • Suggestion to other participants. A lot of people are opposing on the grounds that the new text is not as good as possible. This smells like the perfect solution fallacy to me; can you support or oppose based on whether you think the proposed text is better or worse than the current text instead? (I guess that's what the OP meant by “Please do not complicate the situation”.) ― A. di M.​  11:05, 8 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
    • Is one person "a lot"? (Anyway, there seems to be overwhelming agreement that the new text is an improvement, so discussing ways of making it even better would seem to be the most profitable direction to take at this stage.) --Kotniski (talk) 12:17, 8 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose the changes about reliable sources. The overriding criteria is consistent usage in reliable sources, we use the guidelines when there is no consistent usage. This is better explained by Greg L., Jojalozzo and Kotniski. --Enric Naval (talk) 16:28, 8 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
And guidelines are supposed to reflect current consensus, which is to adapt our guidelines to what reliable sources use. There is a very recent example at Wikipedia_talk:Manual_of_Style#Middle-Eastern_cuisine.3F.3F. --Enric Naval (talk) 16:38, 8 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
I think you're over-generalizing there. The hyphen clarification was in response to some confusion about the incomplete attempt to summarize good hyphenation practice. There's no consensus to "adapt our guidelines to what reliable sources use", which would be another way to phrase the deprecated "follow the sources" concept. If we did that, we'd just say don't use any hyphens, because they are most often not used in sources. Dicklyon (talk) 16:56, 8 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
The change was rejected because it doesn't reflect usage in sources. The guideline was changed to reflect better the usage in reliable sources. This is the current practice and consensus. That part of Noetica's wording doesn't reflect current practice and consensus, since it instructs editors to ignore the usage in sources. --Enric Naval (talk) 21:34, 8 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
"Ignore" is strong language; nobody is advocating ignoring sources. Our style is informed by sources, at all levels. But sources have a mix of styles, so going with our own, while not "following", is also not "ignoring". And I think I know why the Middle-Eastern thing was fixed, and said so when I fixed it: it's based on what I was taught about proper hyphenation. Still, I like what it said about sources before, as I mentioned; you are one of the people who I mentioned as having a hard time following that it said there, since you typically argue to capitalize things that are NOT consistently capitalized in sources. Dicklyon (talk) 21:47, 8 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
If you read the discussions, you will see that it was changed because of usage in sources, not because of "good hyphenation practice" or "proper hyphenation". If an editor wants to ignore the usage in source, then Noetica's wording allows him to do so. --Enric Naval (talk) 22:32, 8 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
My explanation of consistency is not particularly congruent with Enric's position as I understand it. I support the use of sources only when it is unclear how to apply the guidelines (and I would see the guidelines made clearer). I think stylistic consistency within the project should not be sacrificed for per-article stylistic consistency with external content sources. Jojalozzo 05:04, 9 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment - The proposal is not clear about title of persons. Capitalization is used for titles of specific persons not generic persons. It will avoid unnecessary dispute if it was worded : "Most capitalization is for ..., and titles of specific persons." Jojalozzo 23:18, 9 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
I think the simple solution to how to word that sentence is simply to leave it out. The guideline covers all these points in detail. I'm all in favour of using lead sections to sum up briefly what's on the rest of the page, but in this case, I really think that just telling people that it's the WP style guideline on capital letters is enough to ensure that everyone knows what to expect. (However, I think we need a first section on general principles, to establish what we mean by "proper nouns" and "proper names", since these terms are used throughout the policy without any attempt to help people identify what is and isn't one, except by implying that a proper name is one that's capitalized - which as Noetica has already pointed out, is somewhat circular.)--Kotniski (talk) 12:54, 10 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment as proposer. I note that people are still commenting, and that Kotniski has decided to take some action that I myself would have proposed, but with other "structural" reforms included too. I'll continue to hold back from any systematic response for another day or so. Let's see what else comes in.
NoeticaTea? 22:54, 10 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
I think we can move forward now. What do you propose? Jojalozzo 16:25, 13 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support, with tweaks as deemed appropriate. Per Jojalozzo's worry, "Most capitalization is for ... titles of persons" is correct: that is one of the primary uses. It does not say *"Most titles of persons ... are capitalized", which would be wrong. Perhaps the wording could be tweaked to make the directionality clearer if there's a concern people would misunderstand it. — kwami (talk) 04:05, 14 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose (post-analysis, & I think I'm not the only one) I appreciate the problems, but placing a MOS page above RS is rarely going to be a good idea. See Jojalozzo's crusade based on his, I think mistaken, reading of WP:DOCTCAPS. But that section is very brief and loosely worded. This wasn't open very long for such a large step, was it? Johnbod (talk) 21:02, 16 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Without entering into the dramatis personae or the politics at the page you are coming from, Johnbod, I observe: 1) that no one here has expressed the intention of "placing a MOS page above RS" (the dominant idea being that reliable sources are fundamental in developing MOS guidelines in the first place, and explicitly retain a default role); 2) that no one has declared this discussion closed, and I am about to adjust all of what follows to accommodate in the analysis your blanket "oppose" (in respect of RSs, since that is what you appear to be objecting to); 3) that we agree that such changes in the lead (and beyond) are large steps (what is replaced was recent and by no means consensual, and was itself a large step); 4) that you are the first to agree with me on the need to take this slowly! NoeticaTea? 21:40, 16 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
I don't see how "Where is it not clear from the provisions on this page whether a word or phrase ought to be capitalized, Wikipedia consults reliable sources" does not constitute "placing a MOS page above RS". Reading the actual page over, it seems riddled both with lack of clarity and an over-simplistic approach that fails to allow adequately for context (it would indeed by a huge task to cover these matters properly), and also for a slight but distinct WP:ENGVAR issue, as Americans tend to capitalize less than Brits. I think we all know that whatever the page says is likely to be interreted in an even more simplistic way by many people, and I just don't think it is ready to be given such a special status. The discussion may not be closed, but it looks it to a newcomer: "I suggest that we continue like this, gathering many comments, for two more days from the time of this post" dated 8 January, etc. Johnbod (talk) 11:04, 17 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Johnbod—we use reliable sources for determining what the MOS should say. As long as we do that, there is nothing like "putting the MOS ahead of RS" going on here. In other words, if a source about a particular subject deviates from the best style guides about something style-related like capitalization, which should we follow? One argument here is that the style guides are in fact the best source for style and that we might as well be internally consistent on style issues as much as possible. ErikHaugen (talk | contribs) 19:42, 17 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Johnbod, thank you for articulating your concerns with precision. You stress a problem that others also discern. How large that problem looms and what to do about it can be more fully addressed soon. Myself, I agree with Erik; and I do not see that sources reliable for content are in any way relegated for their contribution to style, in their particular areas – especially if they show the right sorts of consistency to influence style guides, and therefore if they influence the development of our MOS guidelines. This has all worked very well for punctuation (at WP:MOS), though predictably we all have some gripe or other with detail there. Every sensitive editor will have some gripe with every style guide! The development of the present page has fallen behind; that needs a sustained effort and much wider scrutiny than it has so far had, and it needs more expertise and less readiness to put sheer unexamined opinion into black-letter guidelines for 6,824,467 articles. Personally, I am concerned that Kotniski is making many changes to the page even while this discussion is active. Some of those changes are connected with this discussion. I wish the page could be left alone more, till we have established bearings for it more reliably. No matter how well motivated Kotniski's changes are, they are not "consensual" in a way that will lessen concerns such as you have expressed. His rate of activity (and the absence of adequate comment and scrutiny) is an additional reason for my not putting in a sustained submission here yet, in response to comments. We need a change of culture in the development of our Manual of Style, and pages like WP:TITLE. I think we might agree about that, because things have not been working well so far. I do make an exception for WP:MOS and perhaps WP:MOSNUM, where editors have seen the dangers and difficulties and worked hard against them. Finally, yes: I did suggest earlier waiting "for two more days from the time of this post" for more posts; but I did not say "and then close the discussion". I am trying to keep flexible and responsive in all of this; and to the extent that I have some informal stewardship of the process, I will continue to do so. NoeticaTea? 23:25, 17 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose per Johnbod, Enric Naval and others. Generally speaking I am in favour of consistency but in individual cases RS's should be trumping MOS, not vice versa. The suggestion that "we use reliable sources for determining what the MOS should say" is an ideal but (for example) reliable sources don't have umpteen different ways of presenting references across the publication, in my experience at least. Ben MacDui 19:59, 17 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for your involvement, Ben. The analysis below has been adjusted to take account of it. NoeticaTea? 23:25, 17 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose. We should follow reliable sources. The only addition useful here would be a note that we put titles in sentence case, not title case; this appears to have been what was originally meant by the much-quoted "unnecessary capitalization." There is no harm in unifying to "proper names," but no real benefit either. JCScaliger (talk) 07:24, 19 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for joining in, JCScaliger. I have no idea what you mean by "unifying to 'proper names' ", but I take it you are 100% opposed to the proposed new wording as it concerns reliable sources. I am adjusting the analysis below accordingly. NoeticaTea? 07:42, 19 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

New lead proposal: analysis of discussion

Since Jojalozzo has asked that we move forward now, I provide this report of opinions expressed in the week-long discussion above. See notes below. NoeticaTea? 08:42, 14 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

17 participants' attitudes concerning PN (proper names) and RS (reliable sources) in the proposed new lead
0 = completely opposed to the new principle
5 = evenly divided between old and new principles
10 = completely in favour of the new principle
– = indeterminate
Analysis of support for the proposed lead
The proposed specification for proper names:
10 editors expressed an opinion; mean of scores: 10.0 out of a possible 10
The proposed relation between MOS guidelines and reliable sources:
16 editors expressed an opinion; mean of scores: 5.9 out of a possible 10 [Updated after 3 adjustments to ratings, and 3 late "oppose" additions to the discussion.–NoeticaTea? 07:42, 19 January 2012 (UTC)][reply]
Notes
  1. The scores concern the principles underlying the proposed wording, not the precise details or whether these things ought to be stated explicitly in the lead.
  2. I invite editors to adjust the numeric value I have assigned to them; I will then redo the analysis when I come back. (I have tried to be conservative in my assignments, in favour of the older wording. This is necessarily rough; some editors proposed modifications but seemed broadly in favour regarding reliable sources.)
  3. If any other editors would like to add their names and their levels of support (out of 10) for the proposed new lead, please do so.
  4. The issues arising go far beyond changes to the lead. Eventually I would like to respond in detail to some concerns and suggestions, and I would like to propose modifications to the structure and content of the entire page.

NoeticaTea? 23:31, 17 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Comments on the analysis
  • I indeed completely support not misusing the term proper noun. As for attitudes concerning RS, do you mean whether it should say “consults” or “relies on” (in a context which makes clear it applies only when the choice would otherwise be unclear)? I'm not fond of either, and would prefer “follows”. ― A. di M.​  10:33, 14 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  • I would just repeat for the record, and in the hope of hearing others' reaction, that I agree that Noetica's changes are an improvement, but would much prefer a simple one-sentence lead saying just "this is our style guidance on capitals", without trying to pre-empt any of the issues that are addressed later in the page. However, more important at this stage is getting the rest of the content of the page right, since as we can see from the various threads below and above, it's not doing a particularly good job at the moment of settling capitalization issues.--Kotniski (talk) 10:47, 14 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  • Noetica, you counted my "comment" as considerably more negative than I intended. Dicklyon (talk) 05:32, 15 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  • Please score my position 10 10. Jojalozzo 17:58, 15 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Proposer's brief responses to four comments, etc.
  • A di M, clearly the real issue is the whole page. The exact wording of the lead can be adjusted once we have confronted what the discussion has revealed. The lead was a vehicle to find the issues. I too would be happy with "follow". But the optimal way to accommodate RSs is something still to work out. The majority seems to think it happens through proper development of MOS guidelines in the first place. I agree with that, and I suppose you do too. I will address this soon in a new section. The present draft for the lead reflects that. Nevertheless, I have adjusted the mean support score down because of your adjusted support rating of 5.
  • Of course we should take note of Kotniski's suggestion that the whole page be sorted out. I'll put forward some ideas soon.
  • Dicklyon, I have therefore adjusted your rating from 0 to 5.
  • Jojalozzo: done; and the analysis is adjusted.
  • Johnbod, Ben MacDui, and JCScaliger have made late entries into the discussion, and in response the analysis has been updated.
Note

I do want to put forward a submission about restructuring the page and resolving certain long-standing issues, but I'm hesitating because I want to get things right. A lot could be at stake. More when I can. No rush, really. I'll notify participants when this thing moves forward. On the evidence from the discussion, I suggest that the lead I have put in place be left to stand. It has much more support than the old one, and it appears to summarise the page well enough for now. It makes a concession in mentioning reliable sources at all (unusual at a MOS page), even if the role they are said to play is not as central as all parties would like.

I will be away from easy access to Wikipedia till 23 January, so I will not be doing anything here before then.

NoeticaTea? 07:42, 19 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Note the new arguments in #Wikipedia_does_not_use_unnecessary_capitalization and #The_provisions_on_this_page, explaining the problems with this text and proposing a new version. --Enric Naval (talk) 14:53, 20 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Requested move for k.d. lang

I am trying to close the notorious k.d. lang loophole in the guideline. There's an RM here. Kauffner (talk) 11:57, 7 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

  • Awwwee, jeez; you went and did it. I wrote a few days ago as follows over at WP:Article Titles:

I am utterly mystified why our article is titled “k.d. lang”. Now I can see what others mean by “double standard.” I can only assume that a bat-shit-crazy, rabid following on that article established a local consensus in violation of WP:LOCALCONSENSUS. I wouldn’t touch an RM on that article with a ten-foot pole; my writing style comes across as “The Man” and I’d be blocked for twelve years for something like ending a sentence with a preposition.(disclaimer)

Nevertheless, I touched that RM with better than a ten-foot pole, I !voted “Support” (∆ edit, here). (*sigh*)
I nevertheless predict the RM will fail. And that failure will no-doubt be only due to the fact that it is hard to get sufficient regular rank & file editors to weigh in on these sort of things. The faithful active on a particular article can circle the wagons in greater numbers. It’s the exact same phenomenon as when a mere 20 editors voted—while the rest of the community was asleep at the switch—that Wikipedia should exclusively adopt “mebibytes” instead of the “megabytes” the rest of the planet uses for denoting computer memory capacity. So Wikipedia was off doing that for three whole years. It doesn’t mean that was *smart* (it was reversed after a three-month-long battle to the death); just that small numbers of wikipedians can do odd things. Greg L (talk) 02:44, 8 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
It did fail, on grounds of both self-identification and of common usage. (Most funky spellings aren't common usage, and we have guidance against those already in MOS:TM; when appealled to, discussions tend to abolish such spellings.) This is one sign (there have been several others) that this guideline - or at least the way it is being applied - does not reflect what Wikipedians actually do. Perhaps it should. JCScaliger (talk) 07:31, 19 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
But k.d. lang is the form that the guideline currently supports, right? --Kotniski (talk) 07:42, 19 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Depends on who's reading it, doesn't it? JCScaliger (talk) 08:29, 19 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Well there's a sentence that deals with this specific instance (under WP:MOSCAPS#Items that require initial lower case - perhaps it ought to be somewhere else to make it easier to find), that explicitly permits k.d. lang. --Kotniski (talk) 09:12, 19 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Advice please? Generic or not?

Power by the Hour raises a not-uncommon issue: the theme of some articles is a mish-mash of the generic and the non-generic. What are your thoughts here? Tony (talk) 10:07, 8 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Second question: Tornado Intercept Vehicle. My hunch is that this should be downcased as a generic class of vehicle: the article describes a Tornado Intercept Vehicle 1 and a Tornado Intercept Vehicle 2, which are clearly titles and should be upcased as now. Tony (talk) 10:31, 8 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I can see nothing generic about that. It's about two individual vehicles. (On the first three pages of Google results, I can see none using that phrase with lowercase letters or referring to vehicles other than Casey's.) ― A. di M.​  10:56, 8 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Well, it is now; my query here appears to have prompted an editor to fix the generic skew at the top of this second article. Tony (talk) 12:04, 8 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Facebook

Is it necessary to mention in the lead that Facebook is often written in lower-case, as "facebook"? I mean, it obviously is, but is it worth mentioning? I have always understood MOS:TM to rule this out unless there are special reasons to do so. What do others think? --John (talk) 13:15, 8 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I understand MOS:TM to be about what to use, not what to mention. The first sentence of the lead typically mentions alternative spellings, though I might agree that facebook is indeed too obvious to be mentioned. ― A. di M.​  18:16, 8 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Revert

I don't understand this objection - Tony (or anyone else), can you explain? Or try to do better (that short paragraph is rather confused as it is now).--Kotniski (talk) 18:14, 8 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Relation between this page and the main MOS page

Some issues seem to be dealt with better in the WP:MOS#Capital letters section of the main MOS page (for example, capitalization of "The", which isn't mentioned here at all). Presumably that section is supposed to be a summary of this page, right? So everything that's there ought at least to be here (and some details don't have to be there if they're addressed here)?--Kotniski (talk) 19:05, 8 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, and yes. ― A. di M.​  20:14, 8 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Right, well I've started trying to fix this up (including by moving the full wording of the section on "The" to this page).--Kotniski (talk) 11:56, 9 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Does WP:MOSTM apply to ALL phrases that happen to be trademarks, in ALL uses?

For those who can't get enough of this k. d. lang matter, here's a formal posing of the definitive general question at WT:MOSTM. I draw it to editors' attention as relevant in a few recent RMs, and potentially in many more to come.

NoeticaTea? 07:04, 9 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Proper names section

I've started a new section called "Proper names", which seems to belong near the start of this page (probably because it's so obvious, we haven't even bothered to say up to now that we capitalize personal and place names). Ideas welcome on how to expand and clarify this section so as to provide a context for the rest of the specific sections of the guideline (which often refer to "proper names", although there's no definition of that term).Kotniski (talk) 13:08, 10 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Hey! I'm glad you've started this section. I've got two points I'd like to bring up. (Please excuse my ignorance.)
  1. Should we call this section "Proper nouns" instead of "Proper names"? If so, let's copy the definition from the Proper noun article.
  2. From the section "Titles of people", a title should be capitalized
  • when the correct formal name of an office is treated as a proper noun; it is correct to write Louis XVI was King of France or Louis XVI was the French king. Exceptions may apply for specific offices.
How do I know when the correct formal name of an office should be treated as a proper noun? Here is an example that I am working on now:
"The constitution does not explicitly say that the president has to be the leader of the party, but the National Progressive Front charter states that president of the Syrian Arab Republic and the secretary of the party is also the president of the front.{{clarify}}<!--What if the President of the Republic and the Secretary of the Party are two different people?-->"
I am not sure which nouns I should be capitalizing and which I shouldn't. What do I do with constitution, president, party, and front? Bah! I should have learned this in elementary school. The best resource I have found is Proper noun—that is probably the place from which we should borrow information and examples. Regards. Braincricket (talk) 09:50, 12 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
P.S. There is inconsistency in the capitalization of convention in Constitutional Convention (United States). Braincricket (talk)
As a general rule, Braincricket, downcase where you can. The example you give looks good to me, although I wonder whether it might be Front as the abbreviation for the NPF. On the definition of proper nouns, I'm a little nervous about the definition offered in the WP article. Tony (talk) 10:10, 12 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, we need to try to address this issue here (Wikipedia articles are not reliable sources, can't be relied on not to change - and in any case we need a definition that we can apply in solving actual problems according to our internal style). Does anyone want to have a go at defining what, for our purposes, a proper name (or proper noun) actually is?--Kotniski (talk) 10:23, 12 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
As to the question asked (which is quite illustrative of the problem we have to solve here), I would certainly agree that "Front" needs to be capitalized (it's a short form of the full name of the NPF, not a generic term - you'd choose some other word, like "party", if you wanted a generic term there). Some of the others are borderline.--Kotniski (talk) 10:28, 12 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Well Kotniski, who do we have who is most competent to define proper noun and proper name on the page?

I am disappointed that you started changing the page (as I note that you often do) without a full discussion on the talkpage. Yes, I did so with the lead (see discussion above); but that was to remove something that was messy, factually in disarray, and plainly non-consensual. And I invited reversion and started an orderly process. Frankly, I am at a loss to know how to proceed now. There are numerous particular debates going on all over the place, all related to the issues we were beginning to come to terms with: the usual totally confused RM discussions; bird-naming at WT:MOS yet again and at enormous length; cluelessness at WT:MOSTM. So when we have a general conversation going (one that I started this time), with some prospect of resolving what will always fall into muddle when we focus prematurely on details we do not understand, it would be great to finish that sustained conversation first, without distraction.

I'll leave things in your hands once again, since you have seized the initiative; and to those who are happy with page-changing before patient reflection as a group of concerned editors. Sincerely, good luck! I'll watch for a while.

NoeticaTea? 11:19, 12 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not entirely sure which of my changes you're objecting to now - as far as I'm concerned, I was just tidying up a lot of mess. If you think I changed anything substantial, then please say so. But the question of how we define "proper name" was an outstanding one regardless of any of my changes - the answer is hopefully one that we can arrive at together (and your input, in particular, would be extremely valued).--Kotniski (talk) 11:30, 12 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Try this then: "I've started a new section called 'Proper names' ...". Why do that, when the whole matter was being systematically and patiently discussed, and I myself had said I would make an assessment and lay out a response to people's abiding difficulties? What was the hurry? You diverted attention from a slow respectful process that was intended to bring lasting results, solving several related perennial problems with capitals and so-called "proper nouns".
Just carry on. I don't want any drama; I'm not editing the page. Go for it. You know what you're doing? Great!
NoeticaTea? 12:15, 12 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
I really don't see the problem here. You started a discussion about one matter (changes to the lead); I started one about another (the absence of a definition of proper names). Clearly they may be related; but there's no need for a talk page to be restricted to discussion of only one issue at a time (particularly as traffic is not particularly high for either of them).--Kotniski (talk) 12:58, 12 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Newspaper headlines

In WP:MOSCAPS#All caps it says to reduce newspaper headlines from all caps to start case. It then gives a footnote claiming that this is what the NYT does. However the link given shows that what the NYT does is not start case (a term I admit I didn't know, but which is defined on WP as meaning that every word is capitalized). What's it supposed to say here: that we use start case in such situations (and so the claim that NYT does it is wrong); or that we actually use normal title case with unimportant words uncapitalized (like the NYT really seems to do)?--Kotniski (talk) 16:15, 12 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

No response, so I'm going to change it to say "start case or title case". If anyone feels that we ought to recommend specifically start case, then please change it back, but do remove or rephrase the footnote at the same time, since it's wrong as it stands.--Kotniski (talk) 10:37, 14 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Composition titles

Another devil in the detail. MOS:CT (here) tells us to capitalize "prepositions that are long (such as those not listed above)". Whatever that's supposed to mean. However WP:ALBUMCAPS (not part of the MoS) sets out much more precisely which prepositions should have capitals (although it also omits some of the other details that are given here). Is it intended that the same guidance apply to other composition titles as for albums; is the guidance given at ALBUMCAPS to everyone's liking; and (therefore) can we introduce the missing detail from there to here and from here to there?--Kotniski (talk) 16:46, 12 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I agree we should harmonize the 2 guidelines. I suggest taking the most precise language from each and combining them into a single guidance. ALBUMCAPS can summarize the guidance with a mainlink to here. --IllaZilla (talk) 18:24, 12 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
No objection, so I'm going to have a go at doing this.--Kotniski (talk) 11:43, 17 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Internet, internet?

This is a question I'd have expected to see answered or at least mentioned on this page - do we capitalize Internet?--Kotniski (talk) 11:41, 13 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

The fact is, internet is a common name when it means an internetwork, but by far the most widely known and used internet happens to be called the Internet. Hence, the answer is that 99% of the times it doesn't bloody matter whether you capitalize it, as with moon/Moon (though you have to use moon if you're talking about a moon other than the Moon, and you have to use Moon if you are indeed talking about the Moon but in a context where using the moon might be ambiguous as to which moon you're talking about–though in such a context Earth's Moon might be even better). ― A. di M.​  12:01, 13 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Fair enough, though you could say that about almost anything - it doesn't ultimately matter whether you capitalize england or the united states, you'll still be understood, though naturally we do what's right and capitalize them. My feeling is that (just for the professional look) it's more appropriate to refer to the Internet with a capital letter - though I know views differ on this matter. (If we don't care, then we could at least say that we don't care, just to stop people fruitlessly searching multiple MoS pages for the answer to the question.)--Kotniski (talk) 12:52, 13 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Nope; england is not a common name, and united states is but it has the wrong grammatical number and semantics. ― A. di M.​  13:06, 13 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Yeah, I do know that - I was just pointing out that from the point of view of utility, most capitalization is redundant, but we still do it, because we want to look professional etc. So - even though it rarely helps resolve any ambiguity (as you point out) - do we think that capitalizing "Internet" benefits our professional look sufficiently to make it worth recommending that people do it?--Kotniski (talk) 13:17, 13 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
I increasingly see the internet. Tony (talk) 15:54, 13 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Where? ― A. di M.​  19:00, 13 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
That graph (if reliable) would seem to support "increasingly", though the capital still has it by a large margin. My intuition would perhaps be to use "Internet" when considering it from a technological point of view, but "internet" when considering it from a user's point of view, as a means of communication/consumption (you wouldn't capitalize telephone or television, so why internet?) But if good sources are still capitalizing it everywhere, then I guess we follow.--Kotniski (talk) 10:30, 14 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
I suspect sources other than books (e.g. newspapers) use the lowercase version much more often, but then again, Wikipedia is supposed to be written in a formal register. ― A. di M.​  10:36, 14 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

point of fact: there is only one internet but lots of intranets (and in this sentence there are no capital letters). -- PBS (talk) 04:20, 18 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Actually, there is one Internet, but multiple internets. Dicklyon (talk) 04:26, 18 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
do you have an example of another one? -- PBS (talk) 20:07, 19 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
See Internetwork. ― A. di M.​  11:01, 20 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
The second paragraph in the lead does not support you: "The most notable example of internetworking is the Internet, a network of networks based on many underlying hardware technologies...". Yes there can be different internetworks but AFAICT other internetworks would not be called "internet" which has a specific meaning for a specific network. Do you know of any reliable source which states there is more than one internet? -- PBS (talk) 22:18, 20 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

The Kingdom of Heaven or the kingdom of heaven? The Last Supper or the last supper?

Please see Wikipedia talk: WikiProject Christianity#Application of MOS guidelines on capitalization in articles on Christianity. Jojalozzo 19:16, 13 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Start case

It wasn't clear from the link what this is; I presumed it means sentence case. Tony (talk) 11:32, 14 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

If that's the case (no pun etc.), then the example needs to be changed as well: War begins today.--Kotniski (talk) 11:43, 14 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Apparently, it means capitalizing the first letter of each word, including function words. See #Newspaper headlines above. ― A. di M.​  11:48, 14 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Wikipedia does not use unnecessary capitalization

It seems that this sentence at the start of this guideline is being interpreted, by some, to mean that "if there's any doubt as to whether to capitalize or not, then don't". (An example is Noetica's reasoning at Talk:Synoptic Gospels#Requested move.) Is this really what we mean; and if so, when was it decided thus? Surely Wikipedia is not actually so dogmatic on this point – we try to get capitalization right in each case, which means we avoid "purposeless" capitalization (perhaps), but not literally all "unnecessary" capitalization (since, like en dashes, much or all capitalization is not strictly necessary – some sources omit it – but still serves a useful purpose).--Kotniski (talk) 12:27, 16 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I don't think anyone is going to seriously try to interpret this to mean we should not use capital letters at the beginning of sentences, etc. I don't see the problem. ErikHaugen (talk | contribs) 19:30, 17 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Well the problem is not that severe, obviously, but as I've pointed out above (with the discussion link) it is being interpreted to mean that we have a strong bias against capitalization, in cases where sources differ (even if the great majority of sources use capitalization). I don't think this is actually our attitude in general nor that it would be a helpful attitude – we ought to be making capitalization decisions carefully based on the issues in each case, so as to best exploit the differences between capitalized and non-capitalized forms in the interests of discerning readers (like we do with hyphens and dashes) - we don't have some sort of ardent anti-capitalist (hmm) agenda.--Kotniski (talk) 07:40, 19 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Looking at stuff like Talk:Synoptic_Gospels#Move_to_pluralized_title, I can see how that sentence is being used as a slogan to downcase everything. --Enric Naval (talk) 12:33, 19 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Reading this thread makes me wonder which bits are in jest and which are not. Kotniski, many aspects of professional writing are "not strictly unnecessary". Should we abandon them? I'm not sure the interpretation is a strong bias against capitalisation, and do we not already make capitalisation decisions "carefully based on the issues in each case"? The Synoptic Gospels example cited by Enric is a case in point. At that RM there are some detailed, specific arguments. I find a definitive conclusion difficult there; Noetica seems to be expressing doubt, too, I see. But the point is that where usage is mixed, WP has traditionally preferred the unmarked lower case. In this matter we have strong support from prestigious guides on both sides of the Atlantic. The preference for lower case runs deeply at WP: sentence case for titles is a major feature of the site's stylistic underpinnings. Tony (talk) 13:36, 19 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Which is why phrasing like "Wikipedia avoids unnecessary capitalization" is too strong to be useful, and is easily abused. Necessity is too strong a test, in the guideline, as on this page. Without that, the lead describes existing practice. JCScaliger (talk) 14:02, 19 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Your opinion is that WP should indulge in unnecessary capitalisation? Tony (talk) 14:04, 19 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
That's a caricature; as it would be a caricature to suggest that you support unnecessary capitalization at the beginning of sentences. JCScaliger (talk) 14:07, 19 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

The problem is the interpretation of "unnecessary". Clearly the capitalization in Synoptic Gospels isn't "necessary" in any absolute sense (people will always work out what we mean), but it's useful and it conforms to what most good sources do and probably(?) to what most good style guides recommend, so there really isn't any reason for us not to do it - except that we are concerned about obeying our self-imposed rules. If it weren't for over-sweeping statements like "avoid unnecessary capitalization" and similar ones under WP:DOCTCAPS, the question of capitalization of that phrase would never have arisen - it would have been obvious to everyone that we should follow good usage and capitalize. Style guidance is useful when it settles doubts; it starts to have a negative value when it produces doubts where none would otherwise have existed.--Kotniski (talk) 14:14, 19 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

By the way, WP:DOCTCAPS should mention cases like "an annunciation" versus "the Annunciation"? --Enric Naval (talk) 15:13, 19 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Probably should. This sort of thing is being considered in the discussion which is linked to a few threads above this one ("Kingdom of Heaven"...)--Kotniski (talk) 15:33, 19 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

If anything, that lead needs to be strengthened. A couple of editors, most notably Enric Naval and JCScaliger, usually argue to capitalize things where sources clearly show that the capitalization is optional, or unnecessary. It's a concise statement of WP caps style; why fight it? Dicklyon (talk) 06:38, 20 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Because, as has been pointed out twice already in this section, it is unclear and is being used to waste everybody's time with silly suggestions that we should use "last supper" etc. Johnbod (talk) 13:11, 20 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Well, again we need to know what we mean by "unnecessary". If you really think that every time sources differ on a point of capitalization, then we follow the lowercase version, then this seems highly damaging and quite at odds with the usual discerning way in which we handle style questions. We want to get the capitalization right, for the benefit of readers (and I'm sure there are many more readers who get the difference between Gospels and gospels than there are who get Smith–Jones vs. Smith-Jones; but we don't say "Wikipedia avoids unnecessary en dashes").--Kotniski (talk) 07:13, 20 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I agree; “unnecessary” is near-meaningless unless you specify a purpose. It doesn't mean ‘unnecessary for comprehensibility’, as (as was pointed out elsewhere) even if we wrote “england” people would still understand. (In fact, some scripts such as Arabic and Hebrew have no letter case, and they work just fine.) It then means something more like ‘unnecessary for Wikipedia to be written in standard English and be easier to understand and not violate the principle of least astonishment’ or something, but unless we define that something, that sentence is about as meaningful as ‘Letters should not be capitalized except when they should.’ ― A. di M.​  11:08, 20 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Unnecessary for ease of reading, where readers are not in clear expectation of caps (such as in days of the week, months of the year, the first letter of (almost all) sentences, and where proprietary names are almost always capped (Coca-Cola) – where lower-case initials have virtually no effect on readability or recognisability. Tony (talk) 11:37, 20 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
So in fact by "unnecessary" we mean something like "purposeless", as I've suggested before (I think). But I think that much will be more or less understood by everyone (no-one would expect us to go round putting in random capitals for no reason), so I still think (even if "unnecessary" were clarified or replaced by a better adjective) that we can happily leave this sentence out of the lead, and make it clear later on, in the individual sections of the guideline, in what contexts we consider capitals appropriate or inapproriate. (With, as you say, more examples.)--Kotniski (talk) 12:31, 20 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
No, several editors have already objected to what would be a major change. I believe it would be wise to have an RfC if you're really serious about this abrupt change of course. There is no consensus for it. Tony (talk) 15:25, 20 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
I don't intend any change of course (the substantial guidance in the rest of the page would still be there), but it would be helpful to get rid of a vague sentence that is so obviously open to misinterpretation. I don't think it's a big deal; if there's some kind of sentimental attachment to that sentence, we can leave it for now and work on the rest of the page, which has a lot of defects, as we all keep saying. --Kotniski (talk) 18:32, 20 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
I still don't see what misinterpretations you are seeing that concern you. I think it's a good lead, summarizing the idea behind the guidelines. Basically, the text clarifies where caps are necessary, and we otherwise avoid them. Dicklyon (talk) 05:09, 21 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
I've kind of explained the "misinterpretations" - it's being used to mean "if there's any doubt, then don't capitalize". And since the text of the guideline currently leaves most practical questions unanswered, this vague and one-sided dogma is being used by some as a poor substitute for any genuine and properly thought-out guidance on the use of capitals. As I say, it would be more profitable to work on the meat of the guideline at this stage than to worry excessively about the lead, but it seems clear to me that this sentence should go, since it is either empty of meaning ("capitals should not be used except where they should") or plain wrong ("downcase any letter if you can find the slightest reason for doing so").--Kotniski (talk) 14:22, 21 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

General principles section

I think it would be useful to have a general principles section at the start of the page - with a bulleted list of the situations where capitals are used, followed by a bulleted list of situations where capitals are not used (but where people might be tempted to use them). This could contain links to more detailed sections further down the page. Thoughts?--Kotniski (talk) 07:49, 19 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I've been suggesting greater use of examples for a long time. But please don't launch in and add them without significant discussion of proposed examples here. Tony (talk) 13:38, 19 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
This isn't really a suggestion to add examples (we have plenty of those already, though certainly there are some points on which we need more of them) - just a general introductory section containing the main points and helping people to find the right section if they want details.--Kotniski (talk) 14:04, 19 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
What a pity. Without many more examples, the page will continue to be impenetrable for editors at large. Tony (talk) 14:06, 19 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Sure, I agree there are certain parts of this page that are lacking in examples (indeed in any information at all, like the "Proper names" section that I started in the hope that it would be developed).--Kotniski (talk) 14:18, 19 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
I skimmed the early versions of this page and its relatives. The use of sentence case in titles appears to have been to make linking easier; the use of sentence case in sections appears to have been because it used to be much more common to make sections into articles and the other way around. Emphasizing with italics not FULL CAPS does make us look like an encyclopedia, not a web rant.
I think those (and the fact that some editors avoid capitalization of respect, and see it more often than it really happens) are all there ever was to "avoid unnecessary capitalization." I can see how, especially without the technical term to hand, one might describe sentence case that way. But it doesn't add up to a general preference, much less a Rule.
Saying something to that effect would serve as half of a decent general principle. The other half would be "follow reliable sources". JCScaliger (talk) 20:42, 19 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

The provisions on this page

The really controversial phrase in the new lead is

where is it not clear from the provisions on this page

This language has problems; is seems to have wandered from its proper place; but more importantly, what provisions? What does this page actually provide?

  1. Do not capitalize for emphasis. Largely uncontroversial, but not properly described as correct or incorrect, and not decidable from reliable sources.
  2. Use sentence-style capitalization in headers and titles.
  3. Begin sentences (etc.) with capitals. (So will reliable sources.)
  4. Proper names are capitalized in accordance with standard usage. In other words, follow reliable sources.
  5. Do not capitalize The in the middle of sentences, except where idiomatic. In other words, do what reliable sources do.

And so on. (I number the sections as they are in my skin.) If anybody wants to complete the list, all 21 sections before the notes, feel free.

The first two are Wikipedia's treatment of cases where reliable sources will not help. The others - as far as I can see, all the others - are follow reliable sources with more or less indication of what reliable sources actually do. Saying "Follow reliable sources, except where we say to follow reliable sources" is not helpful; doing it at this length is silly. JCScaliger (talk) 14:26, 19 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, I kind of agree. Certainly I think (as I've said before, but apparently not loudly enough to provoke anyone's reaction) that the lead as it is now is unhelpful and would be best reduced to a single sentence saying what the topic of this page is. The "general principles" section that I propose above would serve instead of the rather hurried sentence about "most capitalization is for..."--Kotniski (talk) 14:32, 19 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Done. Let's see what happens. JCScaliger (talk) 16:40, 19 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

This discussion belongs in the section already devoted to Noetica's lead proposal (#"Proper nouns", "proper names", and other concerns: amending the lead). Jojalozzo 18:57, 20 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

No, please, don't try to kill new arguments by referring to old ones. If this argument is correct (and I still have to see anyone arguing that it is not), then Noetica's proposal is based on flawed assumptions about what the guideline actually says. --Enric Naval (talk) 19:08, 20 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Ensure consensus before making changes to MOS pages

I am concerned that several discussions are in progress on this page related to the lead and other sections with participating editors making changes at the same time and edit warring rather than participating in further discussion when their changes are reverted. There is no consensus for many of these edits and waiting less than a day for responses to proposals does not justify implementation. I urge everyone to slow down and allow consensus to develop before making more changes, especially in the lead but elsewhere also. The style-guide template tells us to "ensure that any edits to this page reflect consensus" plus there is a tag that the lead is under discussion which also suggests checking here before making edits. Jojalozzo 01:38, 20 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Some might say you're a fine one to talk, but I'm glad you've seen the light... Johnbod (talk) 02:29, 20 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
If you are referring to my changes at Last Supper, I am not aware that there was an ongoing discussion there at the time. I made those changes in the spirit of BRD as a possible lead into discussion. Jojalozzo 18:52, 20 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
I have just reverted Enric Nazal's extraordinary attempt to make a major change at the top of this guideline. Please discuss it here first, and gain proper consensus. Tony (talk) 06:39, 20 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Well, great, we have again Tony, Dicklyon and Noetica making knee-jerk reverts when they don't have answers for the arguments in the talk page. Note that the long-standing version was changed by Dicklyon in 6 December[39] and further changed in 7 January by Noetica[40]. The technique is to restore their version claiming that it's the long-standing version. Now that there are finally good arguments to why the changes are incorrect, they resort to edit-warring and claims of consensus and long-standing versions that they wrote themselves weeks ago. Go to the two sections above #Wikipedia_does_not_use_unnecessary_capitalization and #The_provisions_on_this_page, and address the arguments. --Enric Naval (talk) 14:47, 20 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
There's no consensus for JCScaliger's recent changes to the lead nor for the reversions of them in the edit war. Calling out those on the other side of an edit war tells on everyone involved. Jojalozzo 18:52, 20 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
It's not the first time Dicklyon resorts to editwarring when he doesn't have answers for the arguments, Wikipedia:Administrators'_noticeboard/3RRArchive166#User:Dicklyon_reported_by_User:Enric_Naval_.28Result:_1_week.29 and Wikipedia:Administrators'_noticeboard/3RRArchive167#User:Dicklyon_reported_by_User:Enric_Naval_.28Result:_No_action.29, and Tony comes to help him with the edit warring, also not addressing any arguments. --Enric Naval (talk) 19:04, 20 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
I would have protected this page awhile ago if I wasn't involved in the relevant discussion. Please stop edit warring on guidelines. ErikHaugen (talk | contribs) 17:39, 20 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Please ask for help. Jojalozzo 18:52, 20 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Elephant in room?

Judging from some of the bad-tempered exchanges above, I've concluded that this must be another of those rooms that has an elephant (or possibly several elephants) in it. Has there been some major disagreement about the capitalization of some term or terms? If so, then can we perhaps have then clearly on the table so we can consider them and decide what principles are at stake, with a view to reaching some conclusions and making the guideline provide some clear guidance about whatever it is? (At the moment the guideline is so vague that it's hard to imagine it usefully settling any specific question that there might actually be genuine disagreement about.) --Kotniski (talk) 19:16, 20 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Who is being bad-tempered? I don't see that. What I do see is a lot of smoke and steam, none of it called for, about a long-standing policy. Disagreements are nutted out at individual RMs, where the admins are trusted to make judgements without fear or favour, and largely do so as far as I can tell. The claim that the current policy is "being used to mean 'if there's any doubt, then don't capitalize' " is not supportable, I believe. Although there's no set ratio of upper and lower case evidence, successful RMs to downcase titles have usually revealed significant downcasing in good sources.

Please calm down and debate the matter in a measured and complete fashion here. Thanks. Tony (talk) 15:22, 21 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Of course Tony doesn't see it; he is one of those exhibiting the temper; his undiscussed reversion, to a text first invented two weeks ago is an example. JCScaliger (talk) 19:53, 21 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Who would not have reverted that destruction of long-standing guideline? Dicklyon (talk) 21:05, 21 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
This begs a question; what Tony reverted to was Noetica's bold edit from two weeks ago. But the answer is: if something is not consensus - and many people have been deprecating this text for some time now - and is controversial, it ought to be removed until consensus is established; those who disagree with it are expected to do so. JCScaliger (talk) 02:04, 23 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

The actual old text was:

Wikipedia avoids unnecessary capitalization. Most capitalization is for proper names, acronyms, and initialisms. Where is it not clear if a term is a proper noun, Wikipedia relies on sources to determine; words and phrases that are consistently capitalized in sources are treated as proper nouns and capitalized in Wikipedia.
There are exceptions for specific cases discussed below, such as common names of fauna. — Preceding unsigned comment added by JCScaliger (talk • contribs) 20:33, 21 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]


The elephant is that two or three editors have been going around removing capitals from a lot of article titles, based on an extreme reading of this section. These have fallen into three classes.

  • Some articles are titled, unsurprisingly, in title case. Changing these to sentence case has been uncontroversial.
  • Some of the changes have passed unnoted by anybody else, or objected to by a single editor. These have passed 3-1.
  • Most or all of those discussed by more than three or four editors have failed. JCScaliger (talk) 19:53, 21 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
I agree that Tony and I have been active in RMs involving case, downcasing lots of things that have unnecessary capitalization. It's less clear who you are thinking of in third place, as lots of others have supported these moves. If you think there's an elephant in the room that people are afraid to mention, why not go ahead and mention it so we know what you're thinking? As you note, many of these changes were not controversial, and many attracted no notice or opposition. I don't believe it's the case that "those discussed by more than three or four editors have failed"; maybe you can collect stats from old RMs and let us know what you find. Also, you could let us know who are the three most active capitalizers (or who comes in third after you and Enric Naval). Dicklyon (talk) 21:05, 21 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
I am intentionally excluding any discussion based on the (so far uncontested) language that says that section headings and titles should be in sentence case. This makes linking easier and is uncontroversial.
However, there is a long list of disruptive and failed move requests from these three editors, based solely on their private reading of the preamble.
Two occur to me right off. I invite additions to this list:
That's non-responsive to the question. The French Quarter RM was not about capitalization, and I withdrew the Halley's Comet RM to prevent further argument when it was clear that the community was polarized 50/50 over it. Neither of these supports what you are accusing us of. And you're still saying "three editors" without saying who you are accusing. So put up or shut up, please. Dicklyon (talk) 22:25, 21 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
50/50? It was 4-7 (plus one for Comet Halley) when withdrawn. Three of the four are familiar from this conversation (the fourth is a simple Support without justification).
For the other, I sit corrected: most of the discussion of "French quarter" was Talk:French Quarter (disambiguation); although it did crop up in the RM . The editors involved are equally recognizable.
I am not accusing anybody, yet. This is not the page to do so. JCScaliger (talk) 02:04, 23 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Maybe not exactly that on the comet; I counted 5–5 before my friend Greg L came in and convinced me that moving toward a consensus to move would not be possible; after a bit of pushing back on his position, I gave it up. It's sort of like the birds project: the astronomers are going to go with the IAU, independent of most sources. Anyway, that's a long time ago. If you have a complaint about how the lead is being interpreted, something about the "long list of disruptive and failed move requests from these three editors" would be needed to get us to look at it. By the way, the oppostion to the comet move included the usual over-capitalizers Enric Naval, LtPowers, and TechnoSymbiosis (but not you), siding with the astronomers. A quick review of my contribs for the last month or so (closed RMs starting Dec. 15 to Jan. 14) shows no downcasing RMs at all, so maybe I'm not one of the two or three you're alluding to. I assume Tony1 is; I reviewed his downcasing RMs for that same period, and found that half of them (9) passed without opposition, andd the majority of the others (5) passed over moderate opposition, usually from you and/or Enric. So it's still not clear what "disruption" you're talking about. In the same period, Tony and I, and probably others, fixed the over-capitalization of many more articles than that, without needing RMs, about 99% without any pushback (in one case I did an RM to reverse what Tony did). You should be thanking us, not whining. Or show us the "disruption". Dicklyon (talk) 04:01, 23 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I do not think personalizing any dispute moves the project forward. Please deal with individual issues on user talk pages. Jojalozzo 22:28, 21 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

To the extent that JCScaliger believes that the wording of the lead is being badly used, or misconstrued, to make inappropriate downcasing moves, we need to hear the specifics from him if we are to examine that as a potential problem. If he's not willing to provide the specifics (like a survey of RMs, not necessarily editor names), then he should just retract the complaint. I'm sure there will be a handful of cases where I will agree with him that Tony went too far; in most cases Tony was willing to back off of those when I presented evidence; this is RM discussions working, not disruption. If JCScaliger is complaining that the RMs that failed were disruptive and the others were OK, then I don't know how to accommodate that thinking. Dicklyon (talk) 22:37, 21 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Can I put the question the other way round - have there been cases where this opening lead sentence ("...avoids unnecessary...") has been essential for making an argument? In other words, is it needed for anything? I suspect that if it has been, then this is because some concrete point about capitalization is missing from the rest of the page, and needs to be addressed specifically.--Kotniski (talk) 12:05, 22 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Continued disruption in the lead

Could I ask why someone has been adding and removing the text, first with the posting of non-consensual text that has serious categorical flaws, and then its blanking. I see that the plainer text that more closely reflects consensus has since been restored. I ask that editors not change the lead again without extensive consultation and consensus. Tony (talk) 05:26, 22 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

"Consensus" here (and at WP:AT) seems to mean "whatever Noetica decides". We've had difficulty defining consensus in the past - I'm glad we've now reached a clear and easily applicable interpretation of the concept. --Kotniski (talk) 11:57, 22 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Consensus is decided by numerous editors, not one. The Board of the Chicago Manual of Style, for example, comes to a consensus that "we prefer lower case" unless there's a good reason for upper case; they reconfirm this in their FAQ updates several times a year. Hart's New Rules, the Oxford style manual, is not quite as point-blank, but their consensus is not far from that of Chicago. I can't see a problem with the opening sentence of WP's guidance. Tony (talk) 12:06, 22 January 2012 (UTC)\[reply]
It would seem that Kotniski's claim does need amendment: "consensus" requires that Tony agrees with Noetica. Has he ever failed to do so? Does anybody but Tony and Noetica support this text? JCScaliger (talk) 01:01, 23 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Isn't "this text" the subject of the ongoing discussion above (#"Proper nouns", "proper names", and other concerns: amending the lead)? If so, a) there are a number of supporters and b) lack of awareness of that discussion may explain some of the disruption in the lead. Jojalozzo 01:16, 23 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Well, "it's necessary" is not the same as "there's a good reason for it". Can't we change it to say the same as you quote Chicago as saying? --Kotniski (talk) 12:10, 22 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
I would favour this change. However, many differences of opinion over capitalization styles are based on what constitutes "a good reason". For example, the lengthy argument above about whether or not to capitalize the common names of organisms has this disagreement at its core. So I suspect that those who want the MOS to be more directive won't be happy with this wording, as it appears more permissive. Peter coxhead (talk) 12:36, 22 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Not necessarily - there can be just as much difference of opinion over what would constitute "unnecessary capitalization" (and the problem in that case is exacerbated by the fact that "unnecessary" is not actually what we mean).--Kotniski (talk) 17:31, 22 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Inserted "good reason", with a note that title case is not a good reason for us, and why. Let's see who disagrees, and if they say why. If "unnecessary" is not what we mean, we should not say it. JCScaliger (talk) 02:26, 23 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
This is OK by me. It could be tightened with "only when there is a good reason" since it otherwise does not preclude using caps when there is no good reason. While you're there, why not make it grammatical as well (e.g. per Noetica's proposal) or did you want it in the garbled state you've changed it to? Jojalozzo 02:43, 23 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
I see this is where Noetica got his ungrammatical text; but it should work now. Let's not have only unless we really need it; it would expose us to much the same abuses as unnecessary. This is a topic sentence, not a Rule. JCScaliger (talk) 03:30, 23 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
And reading strictly, only is redundant: when there is a good reason is a defining clause. That isn't going to stop anybody who is really determined; but neither will this whole guideline. All it can do is to guide those in good faith; if, as with "unnecessary", language is abused, it can be changed when the occasion arises. JCScaliger (talk) 03:54, 23 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
(ec) Maybe it could work with "only", but I reverted JCScaliger's edit that is clearly not going to get any consensus here. Let's discuss before changing it. Dicklyon (talk) 03:31, 23 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
But we did discuss; this entire section is a discussion of these ideas, which I merely summarized. Since Noetica's text is not consensus and was invented less than three weeks ago, it has no claim whatever to stand. (One of its few supporters has just endorsed this text, note.)
What is missing, and has always been missing, is any discussion of why Dicklyon objects (if he does) to "good reason".
This is the recommended approach to difficulties in phrasing: when an objection is explained, try something else which may meet it. But since the objectors have never explained what their objection is (is it really, as Kotniski suggests, that only Noetica can be bold?) one can just try things until it works. Edit summaries of "no consensus" are not helpful. JCScaliger (talk) 03:39, 23 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
I object to edits to guidelines when they are newly introduced, approved only by an ally, and not yet commented on by people likely to be in opposition. As to the particulars, the change from a lead discouraging capitalization to one encouraging it is in the wrong direction, and it's huge. Jojalozzo suggested how it could be made more acceptable, using "only", but you ignored that and added the permissive version. Congrats, you got it locked in for a while. Dicklyon (talk) 04:08, 23 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Purposeless?

As an example, which I would have tried if possible, would be "Wikipedia avoids purposeless" or "unfunctional capitalization", as suggested some sections above. There is no objection to it there; is there objection to it now? JCScaliger (talk) 04:04, 23 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

There are many purposes for capitalization. WP discourages most of them. Why do you want to change that? Yes, I object. But you can't do it now anyway, since the page is locked over your warring to modify the lead. Dicklyon (talk) 04:09, 23 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Misprint, presumably ("your" for "our", easily done). Equally, there are many cases in which capitalization can be shown to be "unnecessary", but where Wikipedia still capitalizes. I really think that trying to sum up our take on capitalization in one sentence is a pointless exercise that would be best avoided by simply not attempting to include any substance in the lead, but if we have to attempt this, then I think Tony's suggestion is the best we've seen so far - we prefer lower case "unless there is a good reason to capitalize".--Kotniski (talk) 07:56, 23 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
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