Tannin wrote:
Over and over again, a small number of good,
decent Wikipedia contributors are causing difficulties
for those of us who are actually doing the hard yards
in the fauna articles. All the major contributors to the
bird entries, for example, have complained about this
on the talk pages, but nothing is ever done. People keep
claiming that, for example, the Common Raven should be
written as "common raven". One need only reach to the
bookshelf and pick up a reference work to discover
that this just ain't so. All we ask is that we follow our
own naming convention:
You mean a specialized publication that only covers birds. Pick up a
dictionary or another encyclopedia and you'll see those species names in the
lower case. As I have stated many times before ; specialists /almost always/
overcapitalize the terms they use but Wikipedia is not a specialist
publication. Also Ortolan has pointed out that style guides on this issue
state that when there is significant doubt in these matters we should use the
"downstyle."
I quote: "Unless the term you wish to create a
page for
is a proper noun OR IS OTHERWISE ALMOST ALWAYS
CAPITALISED." Species names for the higher orders (and
possibly the lower ones too) are indeed "almost always
capitalised" and rightly so, as to do anything else is to court
ambiguity and lose clarity.
Perhaps I was rash when I changed:
Unless the term you wish to create a page
for is a proper noun, do not capitalize second
and subsequent words
To your quote of the current convention (Hm - I could revert myself since I
didn't make that edit based on any consensus...). Nah - the caveat is a good
one but "almost always" to me means way more than a simple majority of usage.
I usually think of that term meaning "greater than 90%" of usage. I've
already stated that these terms are /very often/ not capitalized outside of
specialized publications.
We, the people WHO ACTUALLY WRITE THE ENTRIES
have had a gut full of it. Please stop before the real contributors
in this area get sick of the whole damn thing and take their
effort elswhere.
Nobody wants that but at the same time we cannot add spurious capitalization
to articles Or Else Sentences Begin To Look Very Odd When They Are Wikified -
not to mention grammatically wrong and inconsistent with longstanding
Wikipedia naming conventions.
Hopefully this will clarify the distinction between common and proper nouns:
Common noun (Gram.), the name of any one of a class of
objects, as distinguished from a proper noun (the name of
a particular person or thing).
Proper noun (Gram.), a
name belonging to an individual, by which it is
distinguished from others of the same class; -- opposed to
common noun; as, John, Boston, America.
n : a noun that denotes a particular thing; usually capitalized
So we are only dealing with common nouns here which means the default style is
to /not/ capitalize unless the term is almost always capitalized for some
reason.
It is true that the specialist bird authorities are an excellent source of
information on this subject - but those bird publications are not a useful
source of information on English grammar as it relates to our unique
circumstances on Wikipedia or for encyclopedias in general for that matter.
These experts are experts in their respective fields whose subjects in this
particular case are birds, not grammar. So for our naming needs the
references we should use are dictionaries, style/grammar guides and other
encyclopedias. Encyclopedias have different naming conventions and needs than
do specialized publications. BTW, just because the top transportation
planners in the United States write Transit Village with caps does not mean
that that capitalization is correct in our context.
-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)