[WikiEN-l] bird names etc.

[Daniel Mayer]

Jim wrote: 
>....make sweeping changes to what appears to be 
>standard practice elsewhere.  
>... 

That begs the question since it has not been proven at
all that capitalization of any organisms outside of
the birds is standard. Many, many citations were given
to support the down-style, however. 

>I would search for capitalised mammals, eg Gray 
>Whale, and presumably not find them. 
>... 

Our search is case-insensitive so Blue Whale and blue
whale both return results for our article on blue
whales (whatever the current capitalization).  

Capitalization of this animal's common name is simply
wrong since, as I have stated before, there is no
international standards committee that has made
special rules for naming mammals. Therefore we fall
back to standard rules of English grammer and
well-respected style guides for English. The great
majority of these, as has already been proven, support
the downstyle for the common names of organisms. 

I do have to admit that I am intrigued by the
proposition of distinguishing species names with
capitals. But by own interest in doing so cannot
ignore standard rules of grammar and the fact that
outside of the birds common names are common nouns and
therefore capitalization is spurious.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

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