On Thu, 5 Jun 2003, Tony Wilson wrote:
Have I changed lots of articles? Too right I have. That is what I am
SUPPOSED to do here: change articles for the better. And that is exactly what I am doing, have been doing for months. Now, can we PLEASE have some peace and quiet so that I can go do more of it?
It is good work, but a wiki is not the place to work if you want peace and quiet either for you or for your work... ;)
Seriously, on a wiki, everyone is going to be nosing through stuff that other people have contributed all the time, making edits to it, and some you'll agree with, and some you won't, and well that's just the way it is round here. Sometimes you just have to live with things that you don't like. You should relax, and try to enjoy the wonderful collaborative experience, and not get angry about it. :)
Some people seem to have the attitude that the area of articles that they work on in somehow "theirs", and that other people who don't generally work in that area should keep their hands off them. I don't think that this is at all in keeping with the Wikipedia spirit. Articles are meant for the whole community of potential Wikipedia users - which basically means everyone with Internet access.
Obviously, people who work in specialist areas and have all the specialist publications are going to be, by and large, the people that know most about those areas, and contribute most to the articles in those areas. But they are not writing *for* specialists in those areas, and so if non-specialists say they would like the information presented differently, then the specialists should listen to them.
This isn't about asking for the facts to be changed in these articles, but some people would clearly prefer it if the way those facts are presented were changed. The capitalisation issue is just a presentation thing, and should be decided by the Wikipedia community as a whole, and not just by the people who work on those articles.
If the majority of experts on fauna call an animal the "Aardvark", and the majority of non-experts call it the "aardvark", then the majority of our potential *readership* call it the "aardvark". So that's what our usual naming convention says that *we* should call it, too. We shouldn't make special cases just for one particular group of people without a better reason than just because that's how they do it themselves.
The case of the Green Gorbalwarbler may be a special case, because we need to disambiguate it from just any old green gorbalwarbler (I gather there are eight species). But I think that for common names of animals that have unambiguous names which are used by ordinary people, then we should use those unambiguous names which are used by ordinary people.
Now, where did I put my protective suit? ;)
Oliver
+-------------------------------------------+ | Oliver Pereira | | Dept. of Electronics and Computer Science | | University of Southampton | | omp199@ecs.soton.ac.uk | +-------------------------------------------+