[WikiEN-l] RE: A plea for sanity in capitalisation from the coalface

[Andrew Smith]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Daniel Mayer" <maveric149 at yahoo.com>
To: <wikien-l at 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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