Talk:Its Name Was Penelope

Untitled section

nice article. more citations would be helpful. you don't need to list references at the bottom, since the template:reflist does that for you. --Sitesimu (talk) 20:42, 10 November 2023 (UTC)

Requested move 9 December 2023

The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review after discussing it on the closer's talk page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

The result of the move request was: moved to Its Name Was Penelope. (closed by non-admin page mover) — mw (talk) (contribs) 14:00, 16 December 2023 (UTC)

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Its name was Penelope → Its Name was Penelope – Not consistently written in this odd captialization style by sources, i.e the NYT review says '"Its Name Was Penelope" is about the length of a long short story.', hence we prefer standard title caps. * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 00:39, 9 December 2023 (UTC)

The title of the story itself is actually capitalized "its name was Penelope" with everything except Penelope in lowercase. However, wikipedia wanted the first letter of the article title to be capitalized, turning it into "Its name was Penelope". In my opinion, changing it to "its name was Penelope" would make the most sense. 2601:1C2:4501:34F0:C45F:99DA:2796:2C86 (talk) 08:35, 9 December 2023 (UTC)

Standard title caps would also capitalize "was". Dekimasuよ! 10:26, 9 December 2023 (UTC)

• Move to Its Name Was Penelope per The Washington Post and Dekimasu and MOS:CT. —⁠ ⁠BarrelProof (talk) 18:34, 9 December 2023 (UTC)

And also apparently The New York Times, per the original rationale provided by Pppery. —⁠ ⁠BarrelProof (talk) 01:03, 10 December 2023 (UTC)

• Its Name Was Penelope per MOS:TITLECAPS; that's Wikipedia's style guidance of the formatting of the titles of works. Use Wikipedia style in Wikipedia. SchreiberBike | ⌨  23:31, 9 December 2023 (UTC)
• Move to Its Name Was Penelope per MOS:TITLECAPS. InfiniteNexus (talk) 17:29, 10 December 2023 (UTC)

  Fine with that. Sorry, I erroneously assumed "was" was lowercased in titles in the standard Wikipedia style. * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 18:23, 10 December 2023 (UTC)

• Move to Its Name Was Penelope per arguments above. BD2412 T 00:56, 12 December 2023 (UTC)

Move as proposed. Do not capitalise the copula. Copulae are not verbs. —SmokeyJoe (talk) 22:17, 12 December 2023 (UTC)

I'm not familiar with the concept, but the article that you linked to says "A copula is often a verb" and refers to "copulative verbs" or "copular verbs" or "linking verbs", which sounds like types of verbs. MOS:CT explicitly says to capitalize "Every verb, including forms of to be (Be, Am, Is, Are, Being, Was, Were, Been)". —⁠ ⁠BarrelProof (talk) 23:25, 12 December 2023 (UTC)

It’s (usually) a verb not being used as a verb. A simple way to tell a copula from a verb is to cut the word and see what’s lost. It’s nuanced, compared to the clumsy addition to the MOS to blindly include all forms of “to be”, and results in jarring capitalisation when rigidly following a made up rule. SmokeyJoe (talk) 01:01, 13 December 2023 (UTC)

Interesting, but I don't see any similar instances of "was" in Wikipedia article titles (except one that looks like a mistake because the rest of the title is unusual too). —⁠ ⁠BarrelProof (talk) 01:34, 13 December 2023 (UTC)

It’s the same mistake as with A Boy Was Born. Copula should not be capitalised in titles, but this fell foul of a too-simple writing of a rule, and now it’s a rule because it’s a rule, despite being wrong. SmokeyJoe (talk) 12:29, 13 December 2023 (UTC)

Rules are not right or wrong, they are rules in a context. What is right in one context is wrong in another. Here we follow the rules of Wikipedia, and we debate about changing them, but still they are the rules for Wikipedia.  SchreiberBike | ⌨  13:17, 13 December 2023 (UTC)

• Its Name Was Penelope per MOS:TITLECAPS and others. If there is consensus to change the rule (TITLECAPS) then we can change it accordingly. Cinderella157 (talk) 00:00, 16 December 2023 (UTC)
• Move to Its Name Was Penelope per above. Follow MOS:TITLECAPS until such time as there is a consensus at that talk page to change the guideline. (Plus I don't see any reason to change the guideline.) SilverLocust 💬 10:03, 16 December 2023 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.