Re: [WikiEN-l] bird names etc.

Birds should equally be common nouns. Just because the bird community has come upon a different consensus than everyone else doesn't mean we should follow it for birds and, confusingly, not other animals. We need to choose one standard and stick to it, but it doesn't really matter which one to me. Or, we actually don't even need a standard. Just make the appropriate redirects. --LittleDan Daniel Mayer <maveric149(a)yahoo.com> wrote: Jim wrote: That begs the question since it has not been proven at all that capitalization of any organisms outside of the birds is standard. Many, many citations were given to support the down-style, however. Our search is case-insensitive so Blue Whale and blue whale both return results for our article on blue whales (whatever the current capitalization). Capitalization of this animal's common name is simply wrong since, as I have stated before, there is no international standards committee that has made special rules for naming mammals. Therefore we fall back to standard rules of English grammer and well-respected style guides for English. The great majority of these, as has already been proven, support the downstyle for the common names of organisms. I do have to admit that I am intrigued by the proposition of distinguishing species names with capitals. But by own interest in doing so cannot ignore standard rules of grammar and the fact that outside of the birds common names are common nouns and therefore capitalization is spurious. -- Daniel Mayer (aka mav) __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Calendar - Free online calendar with sync to Outlook(TM). http://calendar.yahoo.com _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l(a)wikipedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l --------------------------------- Do you Yahoo!? Free online calendar with sync to Outlook(TM).