[Wikipedia-l] Case sensitivity

[Daniel Mayer]

>....., the instances where it would
>*actually* be a problem are vanishingly 
>small. I've yet to hear of or think of an 
>example, in fact (although I'm sure there 
>are a few).

Here is some previous discussion and some examples
(its all been said before);
http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Wikipedia:Feature_requests&oldid=96067

>And the instances where capitalisation causes
problems are many.
>
>Khendon  (Jason Williams)

I can think of many more reasons why it is better to
enforce proper capitalization via the software than
there isn't. For example, [[united states]] and
[[UNITED STATES]] shouldn't work unless a human has
taken the time to make a redirect (which would be
waste of a redirect BTW). If the software
automatically links to our article [[United States]]
then there is little reason for users to be careful
about correctly capitalizing and naming their links.
There are also many hundreds, if not more,
encyclopedic terms that have generic meanings that are
lower-cased and then specific legal meanings that are
capitalized ([[environmental protection agency]] vs
[[Environmental Protection Agency]] or [[space
shuttle]] vs [[Space Shuttle]]). Many books, movies,
and plays have as their tiles terms that are of
encyclopedic interest ([[Quantum Leap]] vs [[quantum
leap]] or [[Red Dwarf]] vs [[red dwarf]]).     

If an article is Incorrectly Capitalized Or Otherwise
MisNamed Or Missspelt Then fix the title by moving the
article and fix any incorrectly titled edit links.
Several months ago I fixed many many hundreds
(probably thousands) of incorrectly capitalized and
pluralized pages and edit links. Since then I've
really only seen the occasional newbie mis-titling a
page and most of the time somebody else fixes the
capitalization before I do.

As one other person mentioned, this is even more
important in other languages -- and it should be
stressed that changes to the software will effect all
languages. 

Only proper nouns and some other terms should be
capitalized -- anything else is just incorrect
grammar. We needn't encourage incorrect grammar.

--- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

   

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