Tannin wrote:
It was birds *and* mammals, Toby. Run your eye back
over the lengthy
discussions two months ago. Just about any post titled "A plea for
sanity ..." and signed by me will do as a starting point, but there
are lots of others. Or simply recall that the entire discussion began
when I'd just spent two full days researching and writing entries on
the hopping mice, only to have them buggerised about by people who,
despite meaning only the best, had made no contribution to them at all.
The discussion on the mailing list made no reference to hopping-mice.
In any case, I just read it all, and it focussed on birds, like I said.
The official compromise by mav referred to both birds and mammals:
<http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2003-April/002848.html>,
but then mav almost immediately back-pedalled to just birds:
<http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2003-April/002884.html>.
(Note that he remained agnostic on mammals, not anti-capitalisation
as had been his earlier position. And I speak only of what mav wrote
on the mailing list, not what he wrote elsewhere or believes now.)
This is a helpful citation, thanks.
It might be useful to give a huge list of mammal books with capitalisation,
similar to the huge list of bird books (the mammal books cited have been few).
For my part, seeing that mav hasn't continued any objections on that page
is sufficient for me to accept that a consensus was reached even for mammals,
among those that work on these articles.
By the way, the agreed convention is actually nice and
simple. Indeed,
it simply follows the same convention that applies to everything else.
If the phrase is normally capitalised, then it is always capitalised.
Sure, of course. So is it normally capitalised? That's what's disputed.
Perhaps you're responding to an earlier post of mine where I said
that this discussion was more than style, it was a naming convention.
That's because the style choice (whether to capitalise in text)
*affected* the naming convention. That's what makes this issue:
(A) important; (B) worthy of writing up on a naming conventions page.
I'd like to point out, Tannin, that I'm *not* arguing against capitalisation.
But you need to document the discussions, or it'll come up again and again.
-- Toby