JFrost8401@aol.com wrote:
I don't know why we are fighting this battle for the at least the fourth time since I started contributing in Feb. I thought that a consensus had been agreed through wide debate on the mailing list and various talk pages.
Apparently not, eh? I'm mystified as to why we're spending "millions for edit wars, and not one cent for a naming conventions page" (to mangle a saying :-) ). There's a lengthy but ancient talk page "naming conventions (biology)" but it seems mostly about issues that are long-settled.
I know that for the fish, some contributors are happy with lower case, which is fine. You must have seen the reasons put forth by eg Tannin and myself for the current capitalisation of bird English names (scientific names I don't think are a problem). I have within reach four books, three on birds, and one on cetaceans. All species are capitalised. On my bookshelves I have bird books (too many), and others on mammals, insects etc. All capitalise species names.
It's not really that simple - my personal library is split 50-50 for instance. What I notice is that field guides tend to capitalize, perhaps for easier disambiguation at a glance, but workaday books (encylopedia of plants, organic gardening, obscure tropical ecology tome) tend not to, not even for birds. So to me it's clearly a house style issue, which is fine - we have lots of house style rules already, and their existence forestalls edit wars every day. What I don't think is acceptable is to get all angry if someone doesn't follow a rule that was discussed in various places, but never officially documented in the MoS. People sometimes make ship-related changes that I don't personally care for, but unless it goes against a rule explicitly written out in the naming conventions page or the wikiproject page, I don't consider that I have any valid grounds for criticism.
For instance, in the case of fish, I'm still assessing what is favored practice. When I'm satisfied, I'll write it down in the MoS - people disagreeing with the MoS will have to change it before I'll go along with them changing articles.
Stan