JFrost8401(a)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