In a message dated 04/06/03 13:00:55 GMT Daylight Time, fredbaud@ctelco.net writes:
Well, I looked at [[Red-winged Blackbird]]. It follows the usual convention, capitalization in title but not in text, until you "tidied it up" and changed the instances in the text to capitalized. The problem is that red-winged blackbird is not a proper noun. Not sure how many of these you did and it does seem unfair to ask you go back and try to find all of these that you changed, but the "fait accompli" seems to be of your own making.
Fred
Some of the earlier bird articles pre-dated the agreed convention, so were, of course, brought into line. One reason that we have only recently started adding full species lists for large groups like the hummingbirds is that the sources I know capitalise in line with the agreed wikien convention, so it is simple to convert the list to a suitable layout. Doing the 337 hummingbirds took about 10 minutes.
If the agreed convention is reversed, future species for large families lists are likely to be less forthcoming, since there is no source with uncapitalised lists, and converting a capitalised list to the appropriate form would not be easily automated because (a) some names would remain partially capitalised like Wilson's petrel (b) nobody has disputed that the genus name must be capitalise, eg Parus ater.
I would not accept this is a problem of our own making-we followed an agreed policy. I should also point out that new fauna contributors like Kingturtle and Hawthorne have automatically gone for the capitaisation style they are familiar with.
At the risk of seeming churlish, I should point out that if the policy is reversed, it won't be me going through all the articles (written in good faith to an agreed style) to change the capitaisation.
Jim
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