First, there was a message in the last batch of email that had huge quotes, re-quotes, and so forth, so much so that one section had eight, count them, eight, quoting marks/indents. Please, people, clean up your emails. You don't need to quote every preceding transaction on a topic.
Secondly, I appreciate the mav/tannin compromise on capitalization, and, hey, you see, a compromise was possible, now, wasn't it? Having said that, Tannin, I have to take you to task for being rather insulting by implication to everyone who wasn't one of your self-selected clique of "three or four" experts. What work I've done on fauna is reasonable and a good starting point, and if you don't like it, then it takes a lot less time for you to edit it than it takes to write it in the first place.
Now, I want to be sure that this rule is being applied to fauna, and not flora. It's true that many if not most popular reference works capitalize common names for flora, but authoritative works such as Gleason & Cronquist generally do not except for the first letter when it's in the first word mentioned (as in capitalizing the first word in a sentence) or when it's a proper name, such as New York fern.
-- John Knouse jaknouse@frognet.net