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

[Ray Saintonge]

Krzysztof P. Jasiutowicz wrote:

>Another area of possible problematic capitalization are names of diseases and syndromes. I feel especially Americans tend to excessively capitalize every word in these names. Diabetes Mellitus, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, etc etc 
>
>Can this be clarified and the proper practice added to naming conventions
>please ?
>
This is an excellent point.  In a general work there needs to be a 
generalized approach to this matter.  If we agree to a special rule to 
please the birds we can expect that the whole argument will break out 
again at some later time.  It could be with diseases, but it could also 
be in any of a large number of specialized areas.

(BTW.  Although I am usually responsive to blaming the Americans for 
everything, it needs to be remarked that the capitalist charge in this 
matter has been led by an Australian.) ;-)

I surely think we need a technical review of how we capitalize things. 
 Unless there really are two separate articles for [[common crow]] and 
[[Common Crow]] the software should bring us to the one that exists. 
 Options for dealing with ambiguities could be developed.  

Linked to this is how we handle accented characters so that "e" and "é" 
don't need to be distinguished unless there is an ambiguity.  It also 
ties in with the issue of enforced capitals in the first letter of an 
article title.  That has proven problematical in Wiktionary.

The problem of capitalized bird names operates on two levels.  As long 
as it is only on a stylistic level many of us would probably not be so 
concerned about it that we would change every occurrence of a bird name 
in the middke of an article to our preferred styles.  When it starts to 
affect the titles of articles and how those titles are linked it is a 
more serious issue because it relates to the functionality of Wikipedia.

Eclecticology