Jim wrote:
I raised the point previously as to how this will be decided, with has more relevance now that Mav seems to be retreating from his previous position. If it is a straight numerical thing, the American view is bound to prevail, despite the fact that the proponents of lower case contribute so little to actually writing the wildlife articles.
It has been proven very clearly that this is not an "American" thing. Trying to paint things in that light is disingenuous and smacks of Anti-Americanism (since your premise seems to be that if Americans are trying to impose something then it must be bad).
Oh and using your logic I should have near dictatorial powers over WikiEN just because I've made /far/ more edits than anyone else across nearly every subject. And guess which area I've made a good majority of those edits? In copyediting and fixing things like capitalization. So according to your line of reasoning everyone else should just shut up and let me do what I want.
But I don't try to use my editing numbers as a wedge in an argument because that is irrelevant. The only thing that is relevant is what is the best thing for us to do; the articles and their capitalization does not belong to the people who write them. This is a community matter - esp since it involves how articles link to each other.
Also, this is a wiki Jim, so if you don't like other people editing your articles then this isn't the right place for you.
Are we also going to insist on standardising names, so that the lead article has to be Common Loon, rather than as at present, Great Northen Diver (with a redirect).. and as for spelling! ( incidently, the group article is Loon - I wouldn't want to be chauvinist about this).
Why are you beating that straw man? The argument about what to do with the birds has been won by the capitalizers since each species has been given a very specific name by an international body and their convention is to capitalize those given names. I'm content with that so long as lower-cased redirects are provided (since there is a strong standard English convention to write bald eagle not Bald Eagle).
The issue we have before us is whether or not to extend capitalization beyond the birds where there does not seem to be international standards committees handing out official names which have a one-to-one relationship with particular organisms (let alone any policies on capitalization).
Do you have /any/ arguments to support capitalization beyond the birds?
-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
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