In a message dated 04/06/03 04:28:31 GMT Daylight Time, saintonge@telus.net writes:
JFrost8401@aol.com wrote:
> One other point with regard to the everlasting capitalisation debate
> is that it is usually argued that non-specialist encyclopedias use
> lower case, and only specialist handooks like HBW, HANZAB and BWP use
> capitals.
>
> If it is being seriously suggested that Wikien should be the same as a
> paper encyclopedia (or on-line version thereof), can I suggest the
> following to bring other aspects into line.
>
> 1) Standardise spelling and names as American English (this solves the
> capitalisation problem too, since you lose the European and Australian
> contributors who write 90% of the animal/bird articles at a stroke.
>
> 2) Get rid of articles you wouldn't find in a "proper" encyclopedia,
> such as lists of people called Fred, album play lists, articles on
> "fisting" , lists of famous Hungarians etc. (I'll help on this.)
>
> 3) If you do item 1, then you can also revert the many US-centric
> articles, which just assume there are no other countries that matter,
> back to their original unsullied versions.
I was being ironic. Despite the AOL ISP, I am a Brit, and a major contributor to bird articles. The non-trivial point I was making is that by its nature, the encyclopedia has to be a compromise. If you standardise spelling and vocabulary, you lose all the Old World contributors. If you insist on lower case birds etc, you lose Tannin, Steve Nova and me, the three most prolific contributors. The only reason I haven't written a convention sheet is that it will just start edit war 6. Incidently, you can't blame the AOU. Capitalisation is standard in all specialist books, websites, and English language ornithogical organisations.
Jim