JFrost8401@aol.com wrote:

One other point with regard to the everlasting capitalisation debate is that it is usually argued that non-specialist encyclopedias use lower case, and only specialist handooks like HBW, HANZAB and BWP use capitals.

If it is being seriously suggested that Wikien should be the same as a paper encyclopedia (or on-line version thereof), can I suggest the following to bring other aspects into line.

1. Standardise spelling and names as American English (this solves the

capitalisation problem too, since you lose the European and Australian contributors who write 90% of the animal/bird articles at a stroke.

2. Get rid of articles you wouldn't find in a "proper" encyclopedia,

such as lists of people called Fred, album play lists, articles on "fisting" , lists of famous Hungarians etc. (I'll help on this.)

3. If you do item 1, then you can also revert the many US-centric

articles, which just assume there are no other countries that matter, back to their original unsullied versions.

This seems to be argument by trivialization. I suppose that there are people from AOL who would like to see us standardized to American English, but I still prefer capitalization to capitalisation. The capitalization of bird names has nothing to do with American vs. other English. The American Ornithological Union appears to be the organization spearheading this move toward capitalization. Some of the most ardent supporters of capitalized bird names here on Wikipedia are not Americans, so where does that put your argument?

Most other Americans in Wikipedia have been sensitive to anti-American attitudes throughout the world, and have bent over backwards to accomodate other ways of doing things, why should Jim seek to impose what represents the worst of American stereotypes.

Ec