Delirium wrote:
Chitu Okoli wrote:
By the way, off topic grammatical note on "Wikipedia" (capitalized) vs. "wikipedia" (small letters): I understand that the standard English rule for capitalizing things like this (I don't know how this works in other languages) is that when you are referring to something of which there are many instances, you should use small letters. However, if there is only one such sample in the whole world/universe, you should capitalize it. For instance, website uses small letters because there are millions of them, but the Web is capitalized because there's only one World Wide Web. The Sun should be capitalized (though it often is not, in practice) when referring to [[Sol]], the star of the Solar System, but sun should be left in small letters when referring to any generic star in any generic solar system.
That's generally only the case with generic names like "website", not with brand names. For example, the Coca Cola company makes many products which one would collectively refer to as "lots of different types of Cokes", not as "lots of different types of cokes".
For what it's worth, I don't think it's necessary to capitalize single-instance things either if they're fairly common and not proper names. I certainly rarely see "Web" capitalized these days, and doing so looks a little bit mid-1990s (sort of like hyphenating "e-mail").
(But this is mostly a matter of opinion and taste, really, regardless of what the style-guide-du-jour tries to claim is "correct".)
The piece of history that is innocently missing from Chitu's comments is that we have had hot edit wars over capitalization. Some might argue that "Cokes" should always be capitalized when it refers to drinks so that the uncapitalized version could continue to refer to coal. Some of the most heated arguments have been over whether all species names in English should be capitalized.
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