--- Oliver Pereira omp199@ecs.soton.ac.uk wrote:
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. Oliver
If the majority of non-experts call MS-DOS "DOS", should we? "DOS" means *any* disc operating system, even certain versions of Linux. And same with IM. In this case, we're lucky. Capitalisation conveys no information whatsoever, so it really doesn't matter. We just need to be consistant. In my opinion, we should be scientific and capitalise when we are talking about a specific species (like Bald Eagle), but not when talking about general, non-scientific general things (like eagle).
--LittleDan
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