109.79.177.13

regarding capitalization of ranks/titles

Regarding your comments in edit summaries at Matthew Casey, in short, as outlined at MOS:JOBTITLES, titles are capitalized, offices aren't. It's the difference between "President Nixon" and "Nixon was the president" - both of those examples are correct per wikipedia guidelines. That was why I uncapitalized mentions of the character being a lieutenant, etc., and let mentions such as "Sergeant Hank Voight" remain.

However, it's a really fine point and doesn't matter very much. My main concern was the formatting and other errors, which I will be re-fixing at the article now. I'm fine with leaving the caps the way they are, with a few exceptions (there's no reason to capitalize "contractor," it's just a job). Thank you, Jessicapierce (talk) 02:01, 4 November 2021 (UTC)

There are so many rules it is difficult to know when editors are actually following them or imposing their own style preferences. The WP:SIMPLE rules help everyone avoid problems in the long run. If you had put MOS:JOBTITLES in your edit summary we wouldn't need to have had this discussion. Frankly after looking at it for a while I'm not even sure those occupations are correct, because "construction" is an occupation, contractor is a particular job title and somewhat vague, and similar "politics" is an occupation, and alderman is only a title. Maybe the occupations should be listed as carpenter, and local politician? I don't know.

Now that you've explained I'll be happy to leave the style details to you, but please edit summaries help a lot. I was only checking on the article because editors keep changing his rank to Captain even though that doesn't happen until season 6. That's only a minor issue in the Matthew_Casey article but it is a recurring issue in the Chicago_Fire_(TV_series) and List_of_Chicago_Fire_characters. (People forget that it is not a recap article, it is supposed to be an encyclopedia article.) It is unfortunate that the learning curve is steep and that there are always so many new editors that haven't learned the basics, but then again there are so many rules it is hard to know them all, even if you have been doing this too long and should really be doing something more useful with my time. 😛 -- 109.79.177.13 (talk) 02:25, 4 November 2021 (UTC)

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