Fred Bauder wrote:
One of the counter-intuitive things a new Wikipedian has to adjust to is the convention on capitalization of titles: Only the first word is capitalized unless it is a proper noun. This is not natural as all words in a title are conventionally capitalized. We do that so that links from within text do not need to be capitalized.
In the case of species names we are now making an exception, creating another counter-intuitive requirement: in text all words in the name of a species must be capitalized. Again in contradiction to expected usage. Having adopted the convention that in titles all words in a species name are capitalized we are now forced to have them capitalized in text in order that links work.
Actually, the position of Tannin et al is that it always was supposed to be capitalised in running text. To capitalise the article title is merely a deduction from this; the controversy is ultimately about what should appear in text. But this question gains additional importance because of the effects that it'll have on article titles.
-- Toby