Jimmy Wales wrote:
It is certainly true that we have had virtually no disputes about American/British spelling. I'm not sure that this precedent is assurance of the same thing happening with the Bird/bird issue, though.
I suspect that everybody who's thought it through for a couple minutes realizes that that there's no possible authority to which one can appeal on the issue of American/British spelling. Envy the French! :-)
For biology the naming situation seems to be in ferment, and in some cases there are now authorities who've stepped forward and staked a position. (Sort of like the British Museum issuing new guidelines directing the use of American English in all of its work - there would be rioting in London I'm sure. :-) )
I think there are several changes converging to make this into an issue: 1. Latin is really becoming a dead language - the Linnaean names mean something if you learned Latin in school, but are just noises if you didn't. Studies have shown that nonsense words are extremely difficult to memorize, and scientists don't care for the extra work any more than anybody else does. 2. English dominates scientific discourse more and more every year. 3. Taxonomic churning, as Tannin alluded to, means that the primary purposes of Linnaean names - clarity and unambiguity - have been trashed. Taxonomists are doing this all very earnestly, I wonder if they're aware of the distrust they're generating. I can see a future, for instance, where for animals Linnaean names have fallen out of use entirely, in favor of English common names.
Linnaean names have long-accepted typographic conventions (capitalize genera, use italics, etc), but the formalized use of common names is pretty new, and so far the only proposed convention seems to be to capitalize. It's not yet authoritative enough for Wikipedia to set in stone (except for birds), but if the trends continue, capitalization of common names may come to be an accepted standard that we enforce as strongly as we do now for formatting of Linnaean names.
Stan