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.
Ec