Tannin wrote:
...[Kind words - thank you :-) ]...
Bluntly, we, the people who actually WRITE the fauna entries, are sick and tired of being buggerised about, for no good reason, by people who do NOT contribute to them. Over the last month or so there has been a massive improvement to the bird sections in particular. There is a huge amount more still to do, but the concentrated efforts of three or four regular contributors is really starting to show results. Please, if you don't want to help with this project, at least stop interfering with it.
But I'm trying to do just that - help with the project and make sure that the project is consistent with the rest of the encyclopedia. I've helped Jim with the formatting of the great public domain pictures and helped him attribute the source of those images correctly on the image description pages.
The taxobox tables that you are using I also helped develop (and in fact I'm more proud of these tables than the element tables). Readers are contributors in Wikipedia and I read a lot and contribute a bit here and a bit there. The goal is to make Wikipedia a cohesive whole and greater than the sum of its parts.
In the big picture view it is more important for us to avoid the use of specialized grammar rules and concentrate on general rules - rules known, used and expected by our general English-speaking audience and are used by other general reference works (encyclopedias, dictionaries, and most textbooks).
Thus common nouns (those that tell the "kind" of something) are not capitalized but proper nouns (those that name a singular, specific person, place or thing) are capitalized. Anything other than that complicates matters.
-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
Daniel Mayer wrote:
Tannin wrote:
Bluntly, we, the people who actually WRITE the fauna entries, are sick and tired of being buggerised about, for no good reason, by people who do NOT contribute to them. Over the last month or so there has been a massive improvement to the bird sections in particular. There is a huge amount more still to do, but the concentrated efforts of three or four regular contributors is really starting to show results. Please, if you don't want to help with this project, at least stop interfering with it.
The taxobox tables that you are using I also helped develop (and in fact I'm more proud of these tables than the element tables). Readers are contributors in Wikipedia and I read a lot and contribute a bit here and a bit there. The goal is to make Wikipedia a cohesive whole and greater than the sum of its parts.
In the big picture view it is more important for us to avoid the use of specialized grammar rules and concentrate on general rules - rules known, used and expected by our general English-speaking audience and are used by other general reference works (encyclopedias, dictionaries, and most textbooks).
Thus common nouns (those that tell the "kind" of something) are not capitalized but proper nouns (those that name a singular, specific person, place or thing) are capitalized. Anything other than that complicates matters.
I mostly support Mav on this issue, but I don't go along with the exception that he would make for dog breeds.
After looking at several publications in my own library I find the situation inconclusive. Mammalogists tend to prefer lower case, but ornithologists tend to prefer capitals. Notably, some years back the National Museum of Canada published two companion books: "The Birds of Canada" and "The Mammals of Canada". That distinction is maintained between those two books. Entomologists tend to favour the consistent use of the Latin binomials, and make very little use of common names.
The fact that a certain cohort has currently been concentrating its attentions on the bird articles does not imply that it has any rights to insist on its own peculiar format. We do have Wikipedia rules which, at least in this case, tend to be consistent with the usage of grammarians. The burden of proof falls on the shoulders of those who seek to institute an exception to those rules. I don't think that they have carried that burden, and their approach is "for the birds". ;-)
I have not been recently involved in the flora and fauna articles, but when I happen to wander there again I havew every intention of using lower case for the names of all animals, including birds.
Eclecticology