Talk:Elmo (shogi engine)

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Lowercase, right?

The English-language newspapers are reporting it as "Elmo" (capitalized), but one or more Wikipedia editors are using "elmo" (uncapitalized). I don't speak Japanese, but what I believe is one of the creator's pages [1] has the word "elmo" in a bunch of places, and he links from his twitter to [2] which calls it "elmo", so I think we can assume that lowercase "elmo" is correct. Rolf H Nelson (talk) 01:50, 11 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Oops, never mind. MOS:TMCAPS: "For trademarks that are given in mixed or non-capitalization by their owners (such as adidas), follow the formatting and capitalization used by independent third party sources. When these are mixed, follow the standard formatting and capitalization used for proper names (in this case, Adidas)." So my interpretation is that we should use Elmo (uppercase), even if it's not what the creator of Elmo would desires, in order to avoid causing our editors and readers unnecessary pain. Rolf H Nelson (talk) 02:30, 11 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]

I guess that third-party use lowercase to follow the author's wishes. However, English language sources simply don't know anything as they only read the DeepMind paper. So, elmo still seems more appropriate. – ishwar (speak) 03:18, 11 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]

That's quite possible! However, that wouldn't change that, unfortunately, it may be that it's already mainly known nowadays among the majority of the English-language world as "Elmo" rather than "elmo", and we might as well go along with it at this point. I think there are arguments either way, but right now my reading of Wikipedia policy is that we should use "Elmo". Rolf H Nelson (talk) 04:06, 13 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Well, i think that the wikipedia policy is merely stating to use what the common referent to some thing is. In this case, there is no common referent. The name of this engine is completely new. Furthermore, in the Japanese language, the most common usage is elmo and i would guess there is hardly any occurrence of Elmo if any at all. Deep Mind is either ignorant of the author's capitalization or doesnt care. And, the English language news media are variously (i) lazy/sloppy (most likely), (ii) ignorant [of Japanese media] (also very likely), or (iii) disrespectful. I dont see any reason to follow the English language media when there is already well-established usage in the Japanese language media. Now, if we had several years of reporting of the evaluation function as Elmo over elmo with multiple English language sources ignoring the author's name, then i would be more inclined to agree. Ignoring more numerous reporting in Japanese is misguided and disrespecting the author's wishes misguided and unnecessary, i think. (also, isnt the pain here imagined? Wont the editors/readers feel joy instead, haha?) – ishwar (speak) 19:06, 2 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]

"wikipedia policy is merely stating to use what the common referent to some thing is": I'm not sure what you mean by that, there is no non-shoe 'common referent' for adidas/Adidas (the example given in MOS:TMCAPS). So the situation here seems exactly analogous to me; if policy is to use "Adidas" despite the corporation's wishes, the policy is also to use "Elmo" even if elmo's creator might wish otherwise. Rolf H Nelson (talk) 02:08, 5 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]

The minor "pain" is that there's a English rule of grammar stating words perceived as proper nouns are capitalized, so "elmo" breaks English grammar, which can make it more difficult for readers to correctly interpret the sentences it appears in. There's no easy solution, but the current policy is that capitalizing such words is usually the lesser evil. You can always ask the experts on the MOS:TMCAPS talk page to explain their rationale for the policy. Rolf H Nelson (talk) 02:08, 5 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]