----- Original Message -----
From: "Daniel Mayer" <maveric149(a)yahoo.com>
To: <wikien-l(a)wikipedia.org>
Sent: Saturday, April 26, 2003 11:01 AM
Subject: [WikiEN-l] RE: A plea for sanity in capitalisation from the
coalface
Tannin wrote:
Over and over again, a small number of good,
decent Wikipedia contributors are causing difficulties
for those of us who are actually doing the hard yards
in the fauna articles. All the major contributors to the
bird entries, for example, have complained about this
on the talk pages, but nothing is ever done. People keep
claiming that, for example, the Common Raven should be
written as "common raven". One need only reach to the
bookshelf and pick up a reference work to discover
that this just ain't so. All we ask is that we follow our
own naming convention:
You mean a specialized publication that only covers birds. Pick up a
dictionary or another encyclopedia and you'll see those species names in
the
lower case. As I have stated many times before ;
specialists /almost
always/
overcapitalize the terms they use but Wikipedia is not
a specialist
publication. Also Ortolan has pointed out that style guides on this issue
state that when there is significant doubt in these matters we should use
the
"downstyle."
But I think that most of the people writing the bird articles are going to
be either specialists or get their information from specialist sources.
Imposing the Wikipedia article naming on these articles would then make the
article name inconsistent with the article contents.
Examples of this can be seen in the articles on mathematics, some of the
people writing the articles capitalise a lot of named things like theorems
and conjectures. For example [[Twin Prime Conjecture]] redirects to [[Twin
prime conjecture]] but there are 13 articles which link to Twin Prime
Conjecture and only 5 to Twin prime conjecture. In the [[Poincaré
conjecture]] article text Conjecture and conjecture are freely interchanged
and also the Geometrization Conjecture, the Hyperbolization Conjecture and
the Elliptization Conjecture are all mentioned. Unless an attempt is made to
ensure consistency throughout the articles I don't really see the point of
being so anal about article titles.
Other inconsistencies include articles entitled [[Fast Fourier Transform]],
[Discrete Fourier transform]] and [[Continuous Fourier transform]] which
isn't consistent but has presumably happened as FFT is used outside of
maths. Also [[Monte Carlo method]] has lots of links in it to things like
[[Rejection Monte Carlo Sampling]], why should Sampling be capitalised but
not Method?
Convention, Committee and Pact are all regularly capitalised in titles but
what makes them any different from Theorem, Conjecture or Hypothesis? If the
Riemann hypothesis article should have a small 'h' then shouldn't the Geneva
Convention have a small 'c'?
Unless we are going to be equally picky about article contents then I don't
think we should be so forceful about article titles, especially if there is
a group of people who strongly believe it should be done a particular way.
Andrew (Ams80)
I quote: "Unless the term you wish to create
a page for
is a proper noun OR IS OTHERWISE ALMOST ALWAYS
CAPITALISED." Species names for the higher orders (and
possibly the lower ones too) are indeed "almost always
capitalised" and rightly so, as to do anything else is to court
ambiguity and lose clarity.
Perhaps I was rash when I changed:
Unless the term you wish to create a page
for is a proper noun, do not capitalize second
and subsequent words
To your quote of the current convention (Hm - I could revert myself since
I
didn't make that edit based on any consensus...).
Nah - the caveat is a
good
one but "almost always" to me means way more
than a simple majority of
usage.
I usually think of that term meaning "greater
than 90%" of usage. I've
already stated that these terms are /very often/ not capitalized outside
of
specialized publications.
We, the people WHO ACTUALLY WRITE THE ENTRIES
have had a gut full of it. Please stop before the real contributors
in this area get sick of the whole damn thing and take their
effort elswhere.
Nobody wants that but at the same time we cannot add spurious
capitalization
to articles Or Else Sentences Begin To Look Very Odd
When They Are
Wikified -
not to mention grammatically wrong and inconsistent
with longstanding
Wikipedia naming conventions.
Hopefully this will clarify the distinction between common and proper
nouns:
Common noun (Gram.), the name of any one of a class of
objects, as distinguished from a proper noun (the name of
a particular person or thing).
Proper noun (Gram.), a
name belonging to an individual, by which it is
distinguished from others of the same class; -- opposed to
common noun; as, John, Boston, America.
n : a noun that denotes a particular thing; usually capitalized
So we are only dealing with common nouns here which means the default
style is
to /not/ capitalize unless the term is almost always
capitalized for some
reason.
It is true that the specialist bird authorities are an excellent source of
information on this subject - but those bird publications are not a useful
source of information on English grammar as it relates to our unique
circumstances on Wikipedia or for encyclopedias in general for that
matter.
These experts are experts in their respective fields whose subjects in
this
particular case are birds, not grammar. So for our
naming needs the
references we should use are dictionaries, style/grammar guides and other
encyclopedias. Encyclopedias have different naming conventions and needs
than
do specialized publications. BTW, just because the top
transportation
planners in the United States write Transit Village with caps does not
mean
that that capitalization is correct in our context.
-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
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