Cunc wrote:

Yes. I also am one who believes that Wikipedia policies should follow a variant of Occam's Razor--given two reasonable policies, choose the one less likely to instigate conflict.

I endorse this general concept fully. Editing wikipedia should be relaxing and enjoyable, and we should all cut each other a major amount of slack.

I'm a little baffled as to why this topic has turned into such a perennial dispute. I respect and admire the parties on both sides of the debate, and I most sincerely hope that they will reach a relaxing compromise soon.

For example, instead of asserting that There Exists One Correct Capitalization For Bird Names, admit that there is clearly dispute in the outside world as to what is preferable, and let people do what they see fit. It's the same rule we've followed with American/British spelling, and it works fine. I'm driven crazy every time I see the [[humour]] article, but I recognize that it actually isn't important.

It is certainly true that we have had virtually no disputes about American/British spelling. I'm not sure that this precedent is assurance of the same thing happening with the Bird/bird issue, though.

Suppose someone got excited about American/British spelling issues and started editing dozens and dozens of articles to "fix" it. Would everyone else just relax and let them have their way? Or would we start to have other people doing what _they_ see fit and reverting them.

In practice, our social custom is something like "mild deference to the article as written". That is, if we come across an American/British spelling that seems odd to us, we generally just relax and let it go. We generally respect the wishes of whoever wrote the article first, although I suppose a change or two here or there goes unnoticed and without controversy.

That seems like the best policy here, too. If people want to write with capitalization, let them. If they want to write without capitalization, let them do that, too. If there are inconsistencies, that's a bad thing, but not nearly as bad as having good people at each other's throats over something so minor.

Today somewhere in the world there is someone who wants to learn about birds. That person might someday become a great scientist who will do something very useful with the knowledge originally obtained from wikipedia. We should put every tool in their hands to do that, which means: more content. It's sad to think of the hours wasted on capitalization debates, when there's still so much work to be done.

--Jimbo

Stan Shebs wrote:

Jimmy Wales wrote:

...

It is certainly true that we have had virtually no disputes about American/British spelling. I'm not sure that this precedent is assurance of the same thing happening with the Bird/bird issue, though.

I suspect that everybody who's thought it through for a couple minutes realizes that that there's no possible authority to which one can appeal on the issue of American/British spelling. Envy the French! :-)

Thus we accomodate both.

For biology the naming situation seems to be in ferment, and in some cases there are now authorities who've stepped forward and staked a position. (Sort of like the British Museum issuing new guidelines directing the use of American English in all of its work - there would be rioting in London I'm sure. :-) )

Imposing English official names for species, would lead to riots in other capitals. These other languages have their own common names, and their own capitalization rules. Imposing American English on the British Museum sounds easier.

I think there are several changes converging to make this into an issue:

1. Latin is really becoming a dead language - the Linnaean names

mean something if you learned Latin in school, but are just noises if you didn't. Studies have shown that nonsense words are extremely difficult to memorize, and scientists don't care for the extra work any more than anybody else does.

The Linnaean names are not nonsense words. Even if the principle of English official names could be accepted it would give rise to an enormous number of bureaucratic committees to study and establish the "correct" names for every imaginable life form. That's not exactly a situation to please those who don't care for extra work.

2. English dominates scientific discourse more and more every year.

This sounds like an argument in favour of the Tyranny of the Majority. (See de Tocqueville)

3. Taxonomic churning, as Tannin alluded to, means that the primary

purposes of Linnaean names - clarity and unambiguity - have been trashed. Taxonomists are doing this all very earnestly, I wonder if they're aware of the distrust they're generating. I can see a future, for instance, where for animals Linnaean names have fallen out of use entirely, in favor of English common names.

I have not reviewed the facts about ''Cynocephalus'' but I have no reason to doubt them. I suspect that this sort of thing will continue to happen in whatever language may be chosen. Using English names as an official standard is not likely to save us. I tend to lay the modern blame on the cladists who have revised taxonomy into a series of counter-intuitive groupings based on DNA evolutionary research. The average birder does not have the means at his disposal to sort them out that way.. As an example of equal confusion in English names take the genus ''Anas''; it includes ducks, teals, the gadwall, widigeons, the mallard, pintails, the garganey, and shovellers. On top of that there are 17 other genera in the Anseriformes that include ducks. Are we any better off with the English?

Linnaean names have long-accepted typographic conventions (capitalize genera, use italics, etc), but the formalized use of common names is pretty new, and so far the only proposed convention seems to be to capitalize. It's not yet authoritative enough for Wikipedia to set in stone (except for birds), but if the trends continue, capitalization of common names may come to be an accepted standard that we enforce as strongly as we do now for formatting of Linnaean names.

We also need to take into account the contrary trend among grammar stylists to downstyle capitalization. In the course of developing my position in the present debate I encountered at least one book that considers completely downstyled titles as perfectly correct with only the first letter in the title being capitalized; another recognizes it as perfectly correct to use lower case for pronouns that refer to the deity. A new edition of the ''Chicago manual of style" is due to come out in August; I'm anxious to see what it has to say about its own name.

Eclecticology