[WikiEN-l] Tannin, it seems, has changed lots of articles

[Oliver Pereira]

On Wed, 4 Jun 2003, Daniel Ehrenberg wrote:

> If the majority of non-experts call MS-DOS "DOS", should we? "DOS" means
> *any* disc operating system, even certain versions of Linux.

Well, I did make a qualification:

"animals that have unambiguous names which are used by ordinary people"

Note the word "unambiguous". If there is a term which means different
things to different people, we should mention those different things in
the article for that term. In [[DOS]], we should mention that "DOS" is
often used to refer to MS-DOS, as indeed we do. But this is getting away
from the point...

> In this case, we're lucky. Capitalisation conveys no information
> whatsoever, so it really doesn't matter. We just need to be consistant.
> In my opinion, we should be scientific

Ahem. Being scientific is following the [[scientific method]]. It has
nothing to do with orthography.

> and capitalise when we are talking about a specific species (like Bald
> Eagle), but not when talking about general, non-scientific general
> things (like eagle).

As I pointed out to Tannin, this would require calling dogs "Dogs"
throughout the whole Wikipedia. Even he admitted that that "looks funny".
But that's what you'd have to do for consistency.

Oliver

+-------------------------------------------+
| Oliver Pereira                            |
| Dept. of Electronics and Computer Science |
| University of Southampton                 |
| omp199 at ecs.soton.ac.uk                    |
+-------------------------------------------+