Tannin wrote:

[agreement with compromise] .... My suggestion is that we should start from the idea that if the intention of the article is to single out that *particular* *species* as opposed some *other* species, then capitalisation is correct. ....

This seems like a good rule but I would venture to guess that the only place the up style would be needed is in a small set of articles about the particular animals and a few other places that compare and contrast them. The subtle ambiguity issues that the up style addresses hardly ever come-up outside of that context. There is, for example, no other bird in the US called "bald eagle" other than the "Bald Eagle" that I'm aware of.

In a general context our readers are not going to get the distinction between "bald eagle" and "Bald Eagle" anyway. But when comparing two species then capitalization can be used to make things more clear.

This is a subtle point of grammar that I'm sure only the most astute of our copyeditors will notice. Our naming convention on capitalization should be updated to reflect this subtly.

There will be a problem with edit links though - under this scheme we will tolerate up style and down style red links which could potentially result in duplicated effort (something our naming conventions aim to reduce). But we already live with a similar "red link problem" because we tolerate British and American spelling variations. I'm not aware of that being real problem.

So if the people doing the bulk of the work on those articles don't mind this side-effect then I don't mind.

--Daniel Mayer (aka mav)