Though I do not edit birds, I *absolutely* agree with Tannin and co on the capitalisation topic.

I wonder who made the initial rules on the capitalisation to respect.

I also understood that *a rule could be changed*, should the participants agree on the change. So, the answer : do not capitalise because it is not coherent with the rules decided on wikipedia lead me to say "If the rules are not good, let's change the rules".

I agree english tends to add capitalized letters quite often to stress out the importance of a word. But, in this case, the capitalisation is what is done by those caring with birds issues. That is the rule most widely respected in the world in this topic. Why should wikipedia impose new rules over the way things are named, just because of an old rule nobody can justify really.

Also, stating this capitalisation is only for professionals, so not to be respected necessary, because wikipedia is not professional, is a idea that I find a little bit easy. Either wikipedia is professional enough and goes to the end of it to respect proper naming, or wikipedia is not professional enough, then birds entries are not welcome on it.

Of course, this is absolutely similar to the "Theory" and "theory" debate. Two very proper and clearly identified articles should not be *merged* under one unproperly capitalized name "theory", just for some old and unjustifiable convention. When a concept is identified - outside of wikipedia - with a big-t or a small-t, wikipedia should reflect the difference.

This is also a similarly debate of naming plural or singular. When a concept is known with singular, by all means, let's prefer to singular. When a concept is plural, let's respect the plurality. I am pretty sure the convention on plurality was set up, *only* for facility of linking (ie, farm naturally lead to farms, but farms do not lead to farm). However, the facility of linking should not be an excuse for articles to be forced singular, when they are used in plural in life.

And finally, I think referring (budda can not delete this one) to other encyclopedias to set our conventions is not necessarily a good move. Other encyclopedias can make mistakes (confer Saddam Hussein), that is no excuse to stick with these mistakes.

Wikipedia should not copy other encyclopedia, Wikipedia should be *better* than other encyclopedias.

--- Tony Wilson list@redhill.net.au wrote:

Let's walk through the feelings of the people who are doing the actual contributions, shall we? In the massive task of documenting the 9000-odd species of bird, the active contributors are:

• Jimfbleak. Jim has done an incredible amount of

work on birds, probably more than everyone else put together, and he's only been here a few months. Take a look at his user contributions page, it's a huge and ongoing effort. How does Jim feel about this? "The normal convention is that English names of species begin with capitals, eg-- Magnificent Frigatebird, but groups are lower case". He thinks the wiki practice of editing out correct species names is a right pain.

• I have done 50-odd myself, and not many itty-bitty

stubs amongst them. I work more slowly than Jim, but it's adding up to a fair slab just the same.

• Steve Nova has only been here a very short while

(though he was contributing species accounts as an anon before that) and he's doing quite a lot: working his way through the crows and ravens and now into other families. He has had problems with the silly practice of not using the correct names too.

• Kingturtle joined not so long ago, and like me has

wide interests, but has already made a good start on American birds. His feelings? "Through my dozens of bird reference books dating from 1939 to 2000, all but one use the Ruby-throated Hummingbird convention." Or, on the ambiguity problem: "in order for this signal to the reader to succeed, the species article ... needs to be called "Red-throated Diver." And so on.

• The ONLY person who is regularly contributing

anything of substance to the bird entries that has NOT spoken out against the name-change mania is Montrealis, who has started making a modest number of bird edits lately. I don't know what his view is on this.

So there you have it: with the possible exception of Montrealis (who is the least active of the active contributors in this field in any case) EVERY ONE of the people who actually do the work in the bird entries

> agrees.

Now, please, will the back seat drivers get out of our hair and let us get on with the job?

Tony Wilson (Tannin)

---

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