Tony Wilson wrote:
Which last is what I'm supposed to be working on at the moment, only I'm having to fend off attacks with one hand and create good new material with the other. Hardly condusive to productive working conditions.
Nobody is denying your productivity, but disagreeing with you hardly qualifies as an "attack" - it's just a disagreement, one among the many that are inevitable in a large group of people with disparate opinions. If you're mistaken in your position, then changing lots of articles is not making them better, it's making them worse, so it should always be a fair question to ask about the authority justifying those changes, just as we do for history, and higher taxa, and other tricky subjects. As I'm sure you know, part of scholarly discourse is identifying points of contention and talking about the evidence for and against, and outside of the bird arena, which is known to be a special case, I have yet to see anything that requires wholesale capitalization of species' common names. We're having good discussion on the naming conventions page though, and I hope that will continue until we have a solid result.
I don't much care about the outcome either way, but without a convention based on authority so great that no rational person would ever dare challenge, the argument is going to come up over and over. In fact it will likely get worse, if we succeed in attracting large number of new editors and are not able to convince them all to go along with the established conventions.
Stan