(Cut & paste from Mav's talk page, but of more general relevance.
Formatting will be funny because of the limitations of email, but it
should still be readable)
My former enthusiasm for doing fauna entries has evaporated. After
doing a bit of this and a bit of that, I was really enjoying working in
a field which is, if not controversy-free, at least one where the
controversies are very civilised.
Consider the horrible mess that is bird taxonomy, with the English, the
Americans, the Australians, the Dutch, the South Africans all having
different and incompatible classifications. And yet, here on the
'pedia, we have two Englishmen, an American, and an Australian - all
happily cooperating to build a body of work that is as up-to-date and
scientifically correct as we can make it. It has a long, long way to
go, and there are several thorny issues to resolve, but bit by bit we
are getting there.
Or consider the woeful state of the mammal entries. (I'm thinking of
the Australian ones in particular here.) I've spent days and days
working on these, checking all my facts with appropriate sources as I
go along, and they have started to take some form and accuracy on.
All the while I've been swallowing, largely without complaint, the
constant and tedious fiddling from people who, however well-meaning,
are being very unhelpful. Yesterday I reached a "last straw" state of
mind and I've spat the dummy out.
I don't want to do fauna stuff here anymore.
I take your point about using common names instead of specialist names,
and agree with it. However, we need to think this through. Consider the
three basic situations:
(i) Highly specialised and very formal publications that generally
avoid common names entirely. In these, if it appears at all, a common
name is more a textual decoration than an indication of a particular
precise species. Writers only use the commom name to do things like
avoid too much repetition in a sentence, and never use it to stand
alone as an identification of a species. The common name is, in effect,
used as a sort of psudo-pronoun. For example (just a made-up sentence
to illustrate):
A. australis is endemic to New Zealand, where it is classified as
vulnerable, but on neighboring islands the brown kiwi remains common.
Not a very good illustration, but the point is that the common name
serves no special purpose of identification (in these publications,
binomial names rule supreme) and does not need to be set off in any way
from the rest of the text. Hence, it can be left uncapitalised without
loss of meaning or clarity. (By the way, at least so far as birds go,
this style is very rare indeed.)
(ii) Scientifically correct publications more broadly. These can be
aimed at the general reader or the professional working in the field,
but usually fall somewhere between those extremes. Here, correct
capitalisation is a vital part of the use of common names. In at least
some fields (birds is certainly one), the common name is an exact
equivalent to the binomial name. There is only one Black-shouldered
Kite in the entire world. You can write "Elanis axillaris" or
"Black-shouldered Kite" and no-one has the slightest doubt which
creature you mean. However, a "black-shouldered kite" could equally
well be E. scriptus or any of several birds from the northern
hemisphere. Unless we include the binomial name each and every time we
want to indicate E. axillaris or E. scriptus (as the highly formal and
rather unreadable type of strictly-scientific publication listed at (i)
above does), we have no other choice but to use capitalisation.
(iii) General works which don't aim to be scientifically correct. Here,
there is no particular attempt to be accurate or precise, or (usually)
to identify any particular species. Often, neither the author not the
reader even knows what the species is, let alone cares. For example, if
I were writing a novel, it would be silly to write:
Gloria shuddered at the thought of her pet harming the beautiful
Scarlet Robin she had admired from the window earlier that morning.
You might as well go the whole hog and write:
Gloria shuddered at the thought of her pet harming the beautiful
Scarlet Robin (Petroica multicolor) she had admired from the window
earlier that morning.
In a novel or in a work of general non-fiction, it is perfectly
acceptible (and indeed correct) to not capitalise, as the intention of
the work is to highlight some thing other than the creature in
question. In the passage above, for example, we are not interested in
the robin, nor even in what Gloria's cat has done to it, we are
interested in Gloria's emotional reactions.
In summary, there are three possibilities:
(a) That we always use binomial names if in the slightest doubt about
the identity of a species. This would be, strictly speaking, correct,
but unreadable for the vast majority.
(b) That we abandon the attempt to create a scientifically correct body
of work, and become a light-weight, non-auhoritive place that is little
more than a glorified chat room. (Not that there is anything wrong with
chat rooms, it's just not what I think Wikipedia ought to be. Nor you.)
(c) That we adopt the same solution as is used by the vast majority of
works that aim to be factual, comprehensive, scientific, and accessible
to the general reader too - i.e., we use the correct capitalisation for
species names.
I would be delighted to return to crafting factual, readable, accurate
entries about fauna of all kinds. I have greatly enjoyed doing that
over the last few months. But, fair dinkum, I have had a gutfull of
constant hit and run edits that do nothing but spoil the result of all
the effort I put in. I don't want to be unreasonable or petulant, but
let's face it, we all only work on articles because we enjoy doing it
and find it rewarding. I am no longer enjoying it, and it's no longer
rewarding. As I have documented elsewhere, everyone who is doing bird
entries on any significant scale has similar problems. It's not just
me. I just happen to be the one who has reached the end of his tether
first.
Tony Wilson
(Tannin)
Jim wrote:
>Tannin has a lot more patience than me. I would be more
>inclined to pack in the whole thing than argue at such length
>over an issue where the views of the incorrect majority take
>priority over those of the well-informed.
Again - I mistrust smug statement like this made by specialists when they are
writing for a general reference encyclopedia.
>....
>Tannin is right, 95% at least of the literature capitalises.
Which literature? Not other encyclopedias, not dictionaries, not textbooks,
not other general reference works. Well-respected style guides also prefer
down style names in mixed environments. Wikipedia is such a mixed
environment.
>Although nobody owns articles, I'm sure the capital-changers
>would be annoyed if I made ill-informed changes to their pet
>articles, assuming they write any.
Yes we do - by the scores. Before you spew out such an insulting statement
perhaps you should visit my user page to see a partial listing. Your attitude
here is less than helpful and smacks elitist to me.
>I don't know why this is an issue. Capitalisation should be used
>where it is correct, proper names and species names, and not
>otherwise.
Exactly my point - in most articles links to species names need to be down
style. This is normal English grammar/capitalization. As I've said the
national bird of the US is written as "bald eagle" NOT "Bald Eagle" whenever
that term is being used in a non-specialist context (such as a page on the US
park system).
>I can't understand why people who make no contribution
>to these articles are so determined to undermine those who do.
Copyediting and correcting grammar/capitalization is a very important way to
contribute. Also developing the taxobox was also a contribution I've made
along with helping you format the bird images and correctly attribute them.
I've already stated my compromise proposal which should make you less grumpy.
Please read it:
http://www.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2003-April/002848.html
-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
Tannin has a lot more patience than me. I would be more inclined to pack in
the whole thing than argue at such length over an issue where the views of
the incorrect majority take priority over those of the well-informed.
I welcome amendmends, and sometimes, as in a recent discussion with
Montrealais over Crow/Corvus, even if I disagree, it helps me clarify my
thoughts.
Tannin is right, 95% at least of the literature capitalises. Although nobody
owns articles, I'm sure the capital-changers would be annoyed if I made
ill-informed changes to their pet articles, assuming they write any.
I don't know why this is an issue. Capitalisation should be used where it is
correct, proper names and species names, and not otherwise. I can't
understand why people who make no contribution to these articles are so
determined to undermine those who do.
Believe it or not, Mav and I do agree a lot on this. But we disagree on the
nuances. I agree we need a universal approach (I was the one with the help
of other people who overhauled our naming conventions on names and titles to
create a universally - well almost universally - applicable template. )
>I'm also a biologist. So your presumption that we "know
>nothing" is a bit insulting.
The LAST thing I would ever want to suggest is that someone like Mav, Zoe,
Deb, Michael Harty or others "know nothing". What I meant was that some
editors don't know enough about a specialist area to be able to know how to
apply the capitalisation rules there. I'm a historian and political
scientist (and a few other things thrown in) but I know absolutely nothing
about biology. (I slept through most biology classes in secondary school!)
So I would not go near a page on biology for fear of inadvertently mucking
up content because I would not know what I was doing. It is all double-dutch
to me. All I am asking is that, if someone edits a political science article
I wrote, and they themselves don't much about the topic, presume that I know
what I am doing and that if I write PR.STV, if I write Taoiseach in one
place and Taoisigh in another there is a reason (the latter is the Irish
language plural for the former, though I link that to explain) and if I
write 'King of the Belgians' there is a reason and don't change it to 'King
of Belgium', 'pr.stv', 'taoiseachs'. Or at least ask me first why I wrote
that.
But some editors sweep through an article like someone clearing a rain
forest, cutting down capitals and changing names left right and centre, on
occasion showing that they don't know what they are doing (someone changed
an article on the 'Prime Minister' to 'Prime minister' recently, and the
correct plural 'governors-general' to 'governor-generals', leading to a
string of expletives and a muttering of 'what the fuck have they done?' when
you see the sorry mess left of a carefully worded article. (Example: Someone
keeps changing [[Lord John Russell]] to [[John Russell]] every so often.
Under the [[naming conventions (names and titles)]], courtesy titles CAN be
used where the person is universally known with it and unrecognisable
without it. 100% of history students know Lord John Russell, MP as a British
prime minister in the 1840s. 0% have ever heard of a pm called John Russell.
As a courtesy title 'Lord' was treated like part of his name, unlike a
peerage (like Earl of Ardbraccan) that is separate from someone's name. Even
worse is the person who occasionally turns it into 'lord John Russell'. Or
tried to turn [[W. T. Cosgrave]] into [[William Cosgrave]]. NO-ONE ever
referred to him (bar his wife in the bedroom) as William. 100% of people
know him as W.T. And Gladstone as W.E, William E. or William Ewart, never
William Gladstone! And the next person who turns 'Charles
Mountbatten-Windsor' (as confirmed by Buckingham Palace) into 'Charles
Windsor' because Google says so (Google, believe it or not, is NOT always
right!) will get an anonymous phonecall to the White House claiming Saddam
Hussein is living in their basement: please send in the Marines & some B52s.
(JOKE!!!)
In other words, if it isn't your are of expertise, be cautious. Don't get
the chainsaw out and chop down every capital letter you can find if you
don't KNOW FOR A FACT it is wrong. In many cases, the person who wrote it
KNEW FOR A FACT it is right. If in doubt, ASK the author 'why 'PR.STV' not
'pr.stv'? 'Why the T with Cosgrave? Why use the Lord with Russell? Otherwise
a lot of time is wasted correcting illjudged incorrect 'corrections'. And my
usual response when something 100% correct is 'corrected' to something 100%
wrong, 'Oh, not a friggin' again!' and a line of expletives.
JT
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Tannin wrote:
>In a novel or in a work of general non-fiction,
>it is perfectly acceptible (and indeed correct)
>to not capitalise, as the intention of the work is
>to highlight some thing other than the creature
>in question. ....
And that is my very point - Wikipedia is a general reference and many of the
links to the bird/mammal articles will be from articles that "highlight some
thing other than the creature in question." In those articles it is most
correct to have "bald eagle" in the running text of the article and not "Bald
Eagle".
>In summary, there are three possibilities:
>
>(a) That we always use binomial names if in the
>slightest doubt about the identity of a species.
>This would be, strictly speaking, correct, but
>unreadable for the vast majority.
This would be the least desireable option. I took 2 years of Latin already and
didn't like it - all it did was screw-up my Spanish. :-)
>(b) That we abandon the attempt to create a scientifically
>correct body of work, and become a light-weight, non-auhoritive
>place that is little more than a glorified chat room. (Not that there
>is anything wrong with chat rooms, it's just not what I think Wikipedia
>ought to be. Nor you.)
Nobody is trying to make the articles scientifically incorrect. As I've stated
all my biology textbooks use the down style for the common names of species.
This does reflect a bias towards normal rules for English grammar and against
the artificial rules developed by birding societies/organizations (which, as
you have stated, have been developed to overcome subtle ambiguity issues). I
guess I should admit my own bias - I am a generalist who is often mistrustful
of specialists and other people who claim academic authority. In fact I
purposely did not choose a concentration for my biology major becasue I
feared that doing so would result in me becoming a specialist - thus I would
not be able to see the big picture on how things inter-relate.
>(c) That we adopt the same solution as is used
>by the vast majority of works that aim to be factual,
>comprehensive, scientific, and accessible to the
>general reader too - i.e., we use the correct capitalisation
>for species names.
Like most encyclopedias, dictionaries and textbooks which employ the down
style?
>I would be delighted to return to crafting factual, readable,
>accurate entries about fauna of all kinds. I have greatly
>enjoyed doing that over the last few months.
I would also like to see you return to that - I really enjoy reading your work
and the work of your compatriots.
>But, fair dinkum, I have had a gutfull of constant hit and
>run edits that do nothing but spoil the result of all the
>effort I put in.
Certainely there is more info in the articles you have written that is not
codified in the particular capitalization of the title?
>I don't want to be unreasonable or petulant, but let's face
>it, we all only work on articles because we enjoy doing it
>and find it rewarding. I am no longer enjoying it, and it's no
>longer rewarding. As I have documented elsewhere, everyone
>who is doing bird entries on any significant scale has similar
>problems. It's not just me. I just happen to be the one who has
>reached the end of his tether first.
I'm sorry to hear that - the work that you and other people have done in this
area has been great.
So after reading what you have written and what tc wrote to me in an off-list
email I have decided to a compromise: Have the bird and mammal articles
follow the capitalization convention deemed appropriate by the specialists
and enthusiasts working on them BUT a down style redirect MUST be pointed to
the up style article title.
I also think what is needed is to make redirects far less ugly than they are
now. People seem to get real pissy when they follow a term they know and use
only to get a result that in effect screams "the method you are using to
access this page is depreciated". A technical fix here should solve a great
many naming disputes since, as it is, nobody seems to like to have their pet
spelling/method of capitalization/etc be a redirect becasue the resulting
page after following that redirect is ugly.
When a user accesses a page through a redirect it could be possible to change
the displayed H1 page title of the target page to match the title of redirect
(or at the very least move the redirect message from below the H1 title to
the very top of the page - as it was in Phase II).
But then we would either have to orphan misspellings and truly depreciated
redirects (like / pages) or have a two-tier system of redirects. That system
could use the #OBSOLETE syntax for depreciated page title redirects and
#REDIRECT for alternate and valid ways to express the same term.
That way users can link [[bald eagle]] in an article on US National Parks and
not be greeted by an ugly result that implies that the capitalization of
"bald eagle" was incorrect from where it was linked (when in fact that
capitalization was totally correct from where it was linked - but at the same
time it would not be correct to have a lowercased "bald eagle" linked from
[[eagle]] per the specialists' convention).
The correct capitalization here depends upon the grammatical context and
intent from where a term is linked. So if specialists will allow down style
links to their articles I can live with those articles following the up style
and other conventions deemed appropriate by those users - so long as the
resulting titles are still common names and if the ugly redirect problem is
fixed.
Alas it is getting late - I need to work on my WikiKarma.
-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
Doubtless, much of this was down to the subject matter, but Strauss had also used dissonance in a way that was rare at that time in the opera house.Strauss' next opera was Elektra, which took his use of dissonance even further. It was also the first opera in which Strauss collaborated with the poet Hugo von Hofmannsthal. The two would work together on numerous other occasions. For these later works, however, Strauss moderated his harmonic language somewhat, with the result that works such as Der Rosenkavalier (The Cavalier with a flower) (1910) were great public successes. Strauss continued to produce operas at regular intervals into the 1930s.There is much controversy surrounding Strauss' role in Germany after the Nazi Party came to power. Some say that he was constantly apolitical, and never cooperated with the Nazis completely. Others point out that he was an official of the Third Reich, and that although his post was largely ceremonial, he should have spoken out against the Nazis.Tonight I saw _Blind Spot_. Pity it was out of focus, since it was essentially an [[oral history]] on film.
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Tannin wrote:
>V-1 Flying Bomb: This is a *kind* of aircraft,
>but it is capitalised Labrador Retriever: This is a
>*kind* of dog, but it is capitalised Splendid Fairy-
>wren: This is a specific *kind* of fairy-wren, which
>is why it too is capitalised. (A non-specific kind is
>written as plain"fairy-wren".)
>....
I've already explained why dog breeds can reasonably be considered to be
proper nouns -- they are a specific product of selected breeding with
pure-bred dogs having complete family histories. Aircraft are also specific
products with specific histories. But the real reason why we capitalize dog
breeds and aircraft is because they are almost always capitalized in nearly
every context (specialist or otherwise).
Your hierarchy distinction does intrigue me but it has also been demonstrated
that the common names of species are usually written in the lowercase outside
of specialist publications (most notably in encyclopedias, dictionaries and
textbooks):
Thus my ecology textbook writes "bald eagle" not "Bald Eagle," a
generally-focused field guide on Yosemite of mine writes "peregine falcon"
not "Peregine Falcon", Princeton University's Word Net writes "chinook
salmon" not "Chinook Salmon", The Columbia Encyclopedia writes "yellow
jacket" not "Yellow Jacket", Encyclopædia Britannica writes "sabre-toothed
cat" not "Sabre-toothed Cat", Webster's Dictionary writes "mountian lion" not
"Mountain Lion" and my intro-series biology textbook writes "sea otter" not
"Sea Otter" etc, etc....
Given this, I'm part of the camp (that includes well-respected manual of
styles) that says we should use down style for the common names of species.
-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
I agree totally with Tannin on capitalisation. If an expert on an area
writes a page that shows that that expert knows what s/he is talking about,
why should someone who knows nothing on the topic and may not have heard
about the topic until s/he saw the article, have the right to decide that
THEY know the correct capitalisation and change everything? I have lost
count of the number of good, accurate articles I have seen on wiki which
have been reduced to semi-literate gibberish by clumsy illinformed editing
and screwed capitalisation based on questionable wiki conventions on
capitalisation. Many editors do a very good job, but some are appalling. If
you trust people enough to write articles, can you not trust them enough to
know that if they say bird 'x', office 'y' or voting system 'z' is written
in that form, they KNOW what they are talking about. At least query the use
with them. Don't unilaterally dump their work when you don't know the facts.
Last week we had a talk in my university about the ever dropping standards
of english among students. Students are docked marks for making a mess of
capitalisation in key areas. And many of the errors condemned by the Heads
of Department were things wiki practically enforces in its illinformed and
inaccurate conventions on capitalisation. If a student writes about 'Vice
president', 'First minister', 'Prime minister', 'First past the post',
'Proportional representation using a single transferable vote', they are in
grave danger of failing their exams. Most of these have been corrected on
wiki, but in some cases I had to fight edit wars to get the correct
capitalisation rules followed.
I do not doubt but that some of those enforcing the wiki rules, and some of
those making up the rules, are well meaning, earnest and capable. But they
have got to realise that wiki should follow the best standards of accuracy,
not the lowest common denominator in what we can get away with. If it cannot
capitalise properly, and mislead students into how to use formal names of
terms that are treated as proper nouns, then academics are simply going to
say to their students: 'avoid Wikipedia. It is simply too unreliable'.
Wikipedia deserves better than that but it will have itself to blame if it
gets that reputation.
JT
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