Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
Capitalization can be a function of either the word or its context. Wiktionary only needs to be concerned with the former. It would seem that the drafters of the Declaration of Independance took a little liberty with their emphases, and that's not unusual in preambles. I don't know why you abject to the lack of capitalization in "defence".
'sic' is not an objection. It is the Latin word for 'so, thus' and is used to indicate that an unusual feature of a quoted text is present in the original--i.e. 'it was thus given'--and is not due to editorial oversight. The unusual feature of 'defence' is that it is the only noun in that preamble that is not capitalized--all the other ones are; the point being that the framers of the Constitution[1] were writing English where nouns are regularly capitalized. This is not a feature of emphasis, and was carried on through even mundane regions of subsequent text:
Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths[sic] of all other Persons.
http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/data/constitution/article01/
Current en.wiktionary practice _will_ require separate articles for [[number]] (modern practice) and [[Number]] (former practice), which I don't think is at all reasonable; redirecting from [[Number]] to [[number]] would be a thinkable alternative (and is what happens currently), but even the removal of these redirects has its advocates.
If capitalization is as integral to spelling as the advocates of this recent move have been insisting, then to divorce [[number]] from [[Number]] is to rob us of our linguistic history.
If the Bund für vereinfachte rechtschreibung [sic] were to have its way and la Germanophonie were to do away with the obligatory capitalization of nouns, what would de.wiktionary do with [[kind]] and [[Kind]]? This is not a hypothetical situation, as this has already happened in English and the Scandinavian languages, and is something Wiktionary _has to document_, as 'all words in all languages' implies 'in all ages' as well.
*Muke! [1] The text quoted was not the Declaration of Independence, however topical it would have been to post it about now.