[Foundation-l] Re: Personal research grant collaboration request

[Ray Saintonge]

Delirium wrote:

> Chitu Okoli wrote:
>
>> By the way, off topic grammatical note on "Wikipedia" (capitalized) vs.
>> "wikipedia" (small letters): I understand that the standard English 
>> rule for
>> capitalizing things like this (I don't know how this works in other
>> languages) is that when you are referring to something of which there 
>> are
>> many instances, you should use small letters. However, if there is 
>> only one
>> such sample in the whole world/universe, you should capitalize it. For
>> instance, website uses small letters because there are millions of 
>> them, but
>> the Web is capitalized because there's only one World Wide Web. The Sun
>> should be capitalized (though it often is not, in practice) when 
>> referring
>> to [[Sol]], the star of the Solar System, but sun should be left in 
>> small
>> letters when referring to any generic star in any generic solar system.
>
> That's generally only the case with generic names like "website", not 
> with brand names.  For example, the Coca Cola company makes many 
> products which one would collectively refer to as "lots of different 
> types of Cokes", not as "lots of different types of cokes".
>
> For what it's worth, I don't think it's necessary to capitalize 
> single-instance things either if they're fairly common and not proper 
> names.  I certainly rarely see "Web" capitalized these days, and doing 
> so looks a little bit mid-1990s (sort of like hyphenating "e-mail").
>
> (But this is mostly a matter of opinion and taste, really, regardless 
> of what the style-guide-du-jour tries to claim is "correct".)

The piece of history that is innocently missing from Chitu's comments is 
that we have had hot edit wars over capitalization.  Some might argue 
that "Cokes" should always be capitalized when it refers to drinks so 
that the uncapitalized version could continue to refer to coal.  Some of 
the most heated arguments have been over whether all species names in 
English should be capitalized.

Ec