Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (capitalization)/Archive 4

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"Shorter than five letters" rule / general capitalization rules discussion over at WT:MoS

People frequenting this talk page, please see this. – ὁ οἶστρος (talk) 16:22, 13 January 2013 (UTC)

Capitalisation of "AT-LARGE" when not the first word of an article title

Please see Wikipedia_talk:Manual_of_Style#Capitalisation_of_.22AT-LARGE.22_when_not_the_first_word_of_an_article_title. Thanks! -sche (talk) 16:48, 6 February 2013 (UTC)

Weighing Rules, Policies, and Guidelines.

There seems to be a sentiment from the MOS-enforcers that people are circumventing their rules. I would like again point out that the MOS is a guideline and thus malleable. Wikipedia:Article_titles is a POLICY. Policies have wide acceptance among editors and describe standards that all users should normally follow. Guidelines are sets of best practices that are supported by consensus. Editors should attempt to follow guidelines, though they are best treated with common sense, and occasional exceptions may apply.

To quote Blueboar "Provisions are intentionally not hierarchical. Titles are determined by examining all the provisions and codicils mentioned... and doing so all at the same time. There is no "higher up" in the titling process.... in fact there is no "process". It is a balancing act. Which provisions and codicils will be given more or less weight changes from one title determination to another. COMMONNAME is usually give a lot of weight... but it does not necessarily "trump" other provisions. We never ignore the MOS... we simply weigh it against other factors. How much weight it is given, compared to any other factors, depends on the specific title we are talking about... and our final decision will be different from one title to the next. It seems that this is a difficult concept for most MOS oriented editors to grasp... they seem to want firm and fast "rules" to follow - "do X"... "don't do Y". The problem is that WP:AT is intentionally not "rules" based. It's consensus based. It essentially says - To help you reach a consensus: examine X, but at the same time examine Y... Hopefully X and Y will not conflict... but when they do, weigh them against each other in the unique context of the specific article you are working on. This means that in one article, X will be given more weight... while in another, different article, Y will be given more weight."

"I see editors attempting to overenforce. Exceptions should be easier than that. --SmokeyJoe"

It is rather clear to a large group of people (bird watchers, fiction consumers, a myriad of other editors) that the MOS is being over-enforced as an unbreakable rule. Context is being ignore and the MOS is applied wikipedia wide. I invite all the bird watchers and anyone else interested to come weigh in on proposed changes to Wikipedia_talk:Article_titles and the commonname subsection. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Article_titles#Discussion_.28WP:COMMONNAME_and_formatting.29_part_2 — Preceding unsigned comment added by Xkcdreader (talk • contribs) 08:09, 15 April 2013‎ (UTC)

The recent, misplaced, addition here of "for details see MOS" is an example. This can be a see also, but guidelines do not dictate to policies. The place to put "for details" is in the MOS, referring to WP:AT, not here. Apteva (talk) 18:42, 18 April 2013 (UTC)

These issues, at their heart, aren't really about article titles. Do you think the "bird watchers, fiction consumers, a myriad of other editors" would be happy if these articles had title-cased titles but "bald eagle" was lowercase in running text? No, of course not. Why are you imagining this is primarily about article titles? Discussions about whether it should be "civil rights movement" or "Civil Rights Movement" are not discussions primarily about titles. Titles are just one place that would be affected by the outcome of the discussion. That is all. ErikHaugen (talk | contribs) 16:41, 17 May 2013 (UTC)

Movements

There seems to be a widespread lack of standardization when it comes to the capitalization of movements:

Generic name: Convergence Movement Restoration Movement Charismatic Movement Christian countercult movement Prison abolition movement Global citizens movement

Proper name: Alliance of Youth Movements Viet Khang Movement Oxford Movement Tolstoyan movement King James Only movement Occupy movement

Specific movement: Civil rights movement African-American Civil Rights Movement (1955–68) Photographers of the American civil rights movement Timeline of the African-American Civil Rights Movement

This is only a small sample of affected articles in Category:Movements - there are a lot of them.   — C M B J   07:25, 13 May 2013 (UTC)

This is true for more than just movements; see the essay Specialist style fallacy for a view on why this happens. I don't think anyone would argue that Alliance of Youth Movements should be lowercase, but the rest probably should. Move them? ErikHaugen (talk | contribs) 16:45, 17 May 2013 (UTC)

crises

is there anything dictating the precedent for historical events such as Suez Crisis, Nullification Crisis, Cuban missile crisis? Asdf98761 (talk) 01:56, 21 May 2013 (UTC)

RfC on prepositions in composition titles

I've started an RfC on capitalization of prepositions in composition titles (especially the four-letter rule). Your feedback is appreciated. --BDD (talk) 21:26, 5 June 2013 (UTC)

Missing technical detail

I added basic instructions on how to get article titles to italicize, where we tell people to italicize, here. This was erased in SlimVirgin's recent blanket revert of all my edits here, but isn't even related in any way to the rest of them. Is there any actual substantive objection to this addition? Could there even be one? It's a basic principle of exhortatory and instructional writing that you don't demand something the reader is unlikely to understand how to do already, without telling them how to do it (either directly or with a pointer to some other resource).  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ⚞(^Ʌⱷ҅̆_⚲͜ⱷ^{^})≼  08:59, 6 April 2014 (UTC)

Not exactly an objection, but the article doesn't demand or discuss italicization at all, it just covers capitalization, and the Examples section just gives examples of capitalization. I'd suggest if you want to add coverage on italicization, you should also cover when to italicize, as well as DISPLAYTITLE, either with a separate sentence pointing elsewhere ("See WP:ITALICTITLE for information on when and how to italicize article titles") or with a short paragraph like in Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style/Titles#Examples. Other areas of the article may be more appropriate for this information. Agyle (talk) 23:30, 6 April 2014 (UTC)

I did actually consider not wanting to wander into a bunch of italics instruction here. The "See WP:ITALICTITLE for information on when and how to italicize article titles" idea could work pretty well. My concern was only that people are coming here for quick-and-dirty summary info, or pointerse to where to find what they need, so it's unnecessarily frustrating for them to be told to italicize something that requires esoteric wikigeekery to pull off, but be denied info on how to do it. I'll try adding your text and see if that sticks or if people's revert trigger fingers are still twitchy.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  07:49, 8 April 2014 (UTC)

New discussion

An important discussion started on Talk:Crowned crane and Wikipedia:Move review/Log/2014 March#Black crowned crane now moved to Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style#A new proposal regarding bird article names.

Mama meta modal (talk) 20:56, 9 April 2014 (UTC).

Dog breeds

Look at Category:Dog_breeds, there are dozens of capitalized articles. This exception exists in wikipedia. This conventions should reflect current usage. Editors shouldn't use this page to make publicity of they would like wikipedia to be, and hide how things are currently done. Maybe it can worded in a different way. --Enric Naval (talk) 16:45, 8 April 2014 (UTC)

I don't know what you mean by "make publicity of they would like wikipedia to be", but these guidelines do not need to list dog breeds. If there is a WP:LOCALCONSENSUS there, that group should "convince the broader community that such action is right". And even then, it wouldn't necessarily need to become part of the guidelines. -- JHunterJ (talk) 17:01, 8 April 2014 (UTC)

And not this one; it's a MOS:LIFE matter not a WP:AT/WP:NCCAPS matter, and concerns all animal and plant breeds (and landraces, which are different). Various details with regard to breed naming have nothing to do with either article titles or capitalization in particular, but only as the underlying style issues trickle down to those little sub-concerns.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  22:07, 8 April 2014 (UTC)

Looking at Talk:Welsh_Corgi#Requested_move, I would say that the supporters of lowercasing failed to convince the broader community.

I would add Category:Cat_breeds and Category:Horse breeds. And, hum Category:Goat breeds?? Category:Sheep_breeds? Even Category:Laboratory_mouse_breeds has a capitalized article??? --Enric Naval (talk) 17:58, 11 April 2014 (UTC)

Again, this debate is going to have to cover all animal and plant breeds, and is not an AT/NC discussion, it's a WT:MOS discussion, since it affects article content first and foremost, and article titles only secondarily. The Welsh Corgi discussion raises points that will need to be raised more broadly (and I repeat that the case for capitalizing breed names is different from and stronger than that for species common names), but one dog talk page is not much to go on. Attempting to address the issue here is going to fail, because it's not a NCCAPS matter. NCCAPS is just a summary page of how rules in other guidelines, mostly MOS, apply to AT on capitals. This entire NCCAPS page could be deleted and nothing at all would change, because this page doesn't set any rules at all, it just reports on them. A debate about breed capitalization should be centralized, and should be where it is most likely to be seen as authoritatively covering the entire issue, to the broadest audience, not picking at one edge of it on a talk page no one pays attention to like this one. Now is probably a bad time to bring it up anywhere, because people are tired of hearing about animal capitalization. The case for species common name capitalization is totally unraveling, and would not bode well for this breed-based variant of the discussion at all. The reasons why they're not the same issue are subtle, but patience for such details is at a particularly low ebb right now.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  08:32, 13 April 2014 (UTC)

Not just one talk page....:

• Talk:Catalan_Sheepdog#Requested_move (April 2011),
• Talk:Labrador_Retriever#Requested_move (May 2013),
• Talk:Czechoslovakian_Wolfdog#Requested_move (January 2014),
• Talk:Hooded_Dotterel#Requested_move (January 2014)

The naming conventions determine the title, and the running text follows the title (except for the first initial capital). In an ideal world, MOS and naming conventions would be in agreement with each other and complement each other.

I don't understand why you sort-of-support the capitalization of formal breeds, but at the same time insist in removing any mention of breeds from MOS and from naming conventions. Did you consider that you might be causing the problems with your removals? Maybe you don't want this used as an argument in favor of bird capitalization? IMHO, this dissonance between wikipedia's current practices and the guidelines is causing a lot of problems right now. --Enric Naval (talk) 19:22, 14 April 2014 (UTC)

@Enric Naval: Re: naming conventions determine the title, and the running text follows the title – Actually the exact opposite often happens, and WP:AT defers in many different places to WP:MOS, as do all the NC guidelines. I don't "insist" on anything. You keep trying to add dogs, especially, uniquely dogs, to pages like this one without discussion and sometimes I but sometimes other revert that and suggest it needs an extensive discussion, and it doesn't make any sense to limit that discussion to dogs or have it be on some backwater NC page no one reads. I'm also suggesting to you separately that, as a strategic matter, now is a really poor time to launch that discussion, because of a high level of "issue fatigue" on Wikipedia about animals and capitalization.

This page in particular is way not the place for it, because it's just a summary of other guidelines' rules on capitalization and how they apply to titles; not a thing on this page originated here, and no one is going to take seriously a WP:LOCALCONSENSUS arrived at by the tiny number of people who watchlist this page, especially if it makes up a controversial new rule or contradicts an existing one. WT:MOS is the proper venue, because this will be about usage in running text in many thousands of articles (all breed and cultivar articles and probably all other articles that mention them), and that will filter down, just as species capitalization does, to the titles question. The facts that many breed articles are capitalized and that people keep trying to RM them is strong evidence of WP:FAITACCOMPLI action to move all articles to capitalized names for WP:SSF reasons by fanciers and breeders, against the wishes of many other editors. "Look, they're capitalized so AT and MOS have to say to capitalize them" doesn't work; there's clearly an active controversy about this whole idea. I don't sort-of-support capitalizing breeds; I just know that the arguments are different, and I'm sympathetic to some of them and (more to the point) the sources behind them. There is no dissonance, because the guidelines do not say anything about breeds at all; it's left entirely up to editorial discretion, and that's fine for now. No sky is going to fall if that continues for a while. I don't know what you mean by "Did you consider that you might be causing the problems with your removals?" What problems?

This part didn't make much sense to me either: "Maybe you don't want this used as an argument in favor of bird capitalization?" They're distinct issues; if I were playing some "hide facts I don't like" game, I would not be adding such things to an entire section at User:SMcCandlish/Capitalization of organism names#Capitalization of breeds and cultivars, with a sourcing section there at #External sources on breeds. Just getting started on it. Perhaps add to it? Help identify in off-WP sources (not just dog books, I mean mainstream sources) where and how this is playing out in the real world. I'm not opposed to capitalizing birds because I don't like birds or birders; I'm opposed to it because it's not supported by real-world usage outside of field guides (which do it only for visual scanning emphasis) and by some not all ornithology journals. The cause for animal breeds is different; there's much more mainstream print capitalization. The thing is, a lot of MOS/AT watchers will oppose it simply because they think it's "wrong" and eactly like species names. It takes significant research to determine if this is actually true (if it is, then I'm all for lower-case; my reading so far suggests it may not be so simple).  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  11:29, 22 April 2014 (UTC)

@SMcCandlish: Your words sound reasonable, but then I see your external sources on breeds: you dismiss the advice of the Chicago MOS because "it relies upon faulty logic (by citing invalid authorities)". The relevant text seems to be "Either a dictionary or the guides to nomenclature ICZN and ICBN should be consulted". But a bit sooner in the same page, under "Style and grammar guides", you cite a similar text in a different section of the Chicago MOS, and you cite these "invalid authorities" to support your position. It has all the appearance of cherry-picking parts of the CMOS depending on what position you are trying to defend.

And this deviates from the true problem: there is already a consensus to capitalize breed names, as seen on several categories. Yes, there is some people trying to change the consensus via RMs, and those RMs have failed. The guideline should reflect the current consensus, not hide it under the rug because you think that it's wrong or that it's not the wrong time. --Enric Naval (talk) 17:08, 22 April 2014 (UTC)

@Enric Naval: It was actually people from WP:BIRDS that pointed out that CMoS is wrong on this; it cites ICZN and IC[B]N on matters that neither organization has anything to do with, in that section. I think what happened is someone in the process of editing the last edition copied that "see ICZN and IC[B]N" advice from the scientific names section into the common names section without realizing that neither authority says anything about common names at all. It indicates that they need to re-think and revise and get their advice and the authorities they're relying on correct. ICZN and ICN are the proper authorities to cite on scientific nomenclature issues, and do support the argument I was making in that section. I should clarify the wording that the authoritativeness of ICZN and ICN aren't invalid where they apply, they were being applied invalidly. I'm not cherry-picking anything. Even my pro-caps opponents are the first to agree that CMoS is just flat wrong on citing those orgs for anything but scientific naming.

"Already a consensus": I just addressed that. People who really, really, really like the capitalization moved the articles to upper case (and often wrote them that way to begin with), back when there were few rules on WP and no one really cared. Now that people do care, and we've identified both consistency and the WP:ASTONISH effect to be important here, these moves are being questioned (well, they were already being questioned much earlier, but people were mostly unwilling to debate it very far). You've already been reverted by multiple people in multiple places (as have some others, I believe Shyamal was one; I can go dig it up later, but have to go do some work for a client this afternoon) on adding dog breeds and (in someone else's case I think) some other breeds. That's a further indication of lack of consensus. See the MOS archives for previous discussions, too.[1] The current situation is okay - no one is decapitalizing these articles in a mad spree, and no one is madly capitalizing all animal names; it's stable for now.

I've written up short versions of both "takes" on breed capitalization at the draft WP:Manual of Style/Organisms#Formal breeds, cultivars, and varieties. It should be obvious that (after adding in any other pro/con points) they're the basis of a future WP:RFC on the matter. I'm not saying "Don't resolve this", I'm saying "let's resolve this after a breather". You'll see that I've gone to some trouble to neutrally write up both sides. If you look at the rest of that page, it's pretty clear I'm not trying to play any games; I'm working full-bore to have MOS agree with every nomenclature code under the sun, as much as is practical, without driving our editors mad.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  20:52, 22 April 2014 (UTC)

@SMcCandlish: I can't find flaws in your argument, I will have to accept it.

Also, the bird names RfC has been closed. And the closer's arguments are well-reasoned.

I disagree with preferring generalist sources over specialists sources, but after reading the outsiders' comments in Wikipedia_talk:MOS#Bird_article_names:_option_1 I can understand better why people would want to do that. --Enric Naval (talk) 11:28, 1 May 2014 (UTC)

The preference for generalist sources basically comes down to WP being written for a general not specialist audience. If we capitalized and did other style things the way all specialist sources in all fields do, almost everything on WP would be capitalized, most hyphenation would be abandoned, everything that could be written with jargon terms would be, and many other reading problems would be introduced. It's just not feasible. WP adopts specialist practices when they are actually helpful, for everyone, in our context (e.g. units of measure are given without a "." at the end, are in lower case, and are spaced apart from the preceding number, as in 34 ft and 34 mm, not 34 ft., 34Ft, 34 mm., or 34mm, because the consistency is useful, and this standard from science publishing doesn't conflict with any normal expectations, but just picks one from a wide range of conflicting usages. Capitalizing species names conflicted with almost everyone's expectations. With animal breeds, it's not clear yet whether that's the case. When it's not helpful, we don't do it; e.g., WP has not adopted kibi-, mebi- and gibibytes because they don't reflect real-world usage, and it's easier to simply specify whether we're using base-1000 or base-1024 kilobytes than explain what a kibibyte is. Lots of things are like this on WP, and people usually don't get emotional about it.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  20:27, 1 May 2014 (UTC)

Bird article name (capitalisation)

Stale

 – Mooted by admin-closed RfC at WP:BIRDCON

Move discussion involving naming conventions

There is a move discussion in progress on Talk:Crowned Crane about four articles related to birds species. The rationale is that there is no reason why bird names should be capitalised while Wikipedia recommends that all species names should not be written with capitals. Please participate in the discussion.
Thank you! Mama meta modal (talk) 09:08, 9 March 2014 (UTC).

Request for comments

There is now also an ongoing request for comments on the same subject: Talk:Crowned Crane#Request for comments.

Do not hesitate to come and comment on this question. Mama meta modal (talk) 08:52, 16 March 2014 (UTC).

Consensus

The discussion was closed (and the pages moved) on 26 March 2014, see Talk:Crowned crane#Requested move for details.

Mama meta modal (talk) 20:49, 26 March 2014 (UTC).

Move review for species pages at Wikipedia:Move review/Log/2014 March. Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 00:32, 27 March 2014 (UTC)

The consensus is now clear. The relevant pages will soon be checked and made consistent with Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style#Bird common name decapitalisation.

H. H. Wander Strata (talk) 23:06, 2 May 2014 (UTC).

No consensus for bird caps as WP "standard", species names as "proper names", etc.

FYI

 – Pointer to related discussion: Wikipedia talk:Article titles#Bird species name [now archived]

Given that they are clearly controversial, and were undiscussed, and are pushing a POV for which there is no consensus (they directly contradict MOS:LIFE), I've mostly reverted Shyamal's overly bold changes to the organisms material here and at WP:NCFAUNA. Among (but not exhaustive of) the problem with these change are:

• Species common names being considered proper names (every debate about the idea on WP, ever, has debunked this idea)
• IOC names and style as a MOS- or WP-recognized "standard"
• Listing birds as an "exception", an idea that has never been endorsed by consensus here, at AT, MOS or elsewhere
• Treating dog breeds as somehow different from all other domestic animals
• Capitalization of domestic animal breeds at all as a consensus (it isn't, though it might become one)
• Treating capitalization of domestic animal breeds and wild organism names as the same issue with the same rationales (they're actually very, very different)
• Weasel-wording and other confused/poor writing
• Blatant attempt to usurp and conflict with WP:MOS on, well, everything the author can think of
• Disagreement even with the wording at WP:NCFAUNA
• and more

Actually, the entire section is redundant with NCFAUNA.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ⚞(^Ʌⱷ҅̆_⚲͜ⱷ^{^})≼  13:22, 5 April 2014 (UTC)

Hi SMcCandlish, I've just reverted an edit you made here that seemed to change a lot, but I'm not familiar with this dispute so I don't know whether you were changing it back to a version that had consensus. I think everyone should stop trying to change these guidelines and discuss instead, given how heated it has been (and preferably not start it up again, because it seemed to have settled down). SlimVirgin ^(talk) 15:35, 5 April 2014 (UTC)

I had in fact changed it back to a version that had consensus, other than it contained an error that was undetected for a while, then I fixed that error, and made a few other tweaks. I've now reverted back to that consensus version, fixed the error separately again, and opened a new thread below about the error so people don't get the topics confused. I realize that some editors have a distaste for disputes relating to the MOS and AT, but attempts to resolve glaring conflicts need not stop because some don't care for the discussions. People taking a break from trying to resolve disputes that become heated and fail to reach resolution doesn't mean that the disputes will never be discussed again. Plenty of discussion is ongoing, at both WT:AT and more actively at WT:MOS; part of having a even field in these discussions is reverting recent massive changes, e.g. by Shyamal to this whole series of related pages, to before they were made without any discussion at all. If you are "not familiar with this disputes" and "don't know whether [someone was] changing it back to a version that had consensus" you are not likely to be the best party to perform reverts here (or at related pages as you did earlier). At very least, reverting someone else's revert to a consensus version, which results in restoring major changes that are clearly disputed, isn't very helpful. Please note that discussion of these changes to the NC pages is centralized at WT:AT#Bird species name (not my title; it's not really about birds, but about improper attempts to expand the scope of NC pages to cover article content style matters, and to do so on the basis of falsely promoting particular external organizations or publications as official WP standards without anything even approaching a consensus). In the interim, fixing glaring problems like false promotion of essays as guidelines should not be held up because of wider consensus discussion about style matters, just because the same section is involved. They're completely severable editing concerns.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ⚞(^Ʌⱷ҅̆_⚲͜ⱷ^{^})≼  08:36, 6 April 2014 (UTC)

PS: If you want to be serious about going back to a consensus version, we need to go one more major step back and undo this as well, by a user indef-blocked for tendentious sprees of POV-pushing his MOS and AT/NC changes like that one without consensus. It was just an oversight that this edit of his wasn't put back. But, whatever. His's changes here were nowhere near as radical as Shyamal's, and no one has really been paying attention here and objected to that earlier change, because this page is hardly watchlisted by anyone and it is not the controlling guideline for handling of organism names in article titles; the entire section should be replaced with nothing but cross references to WP:NCFAUNA and WP:NCFLORA, as everything else here is just redundant and another point for people to inadvertently or intentionally WP:POVFORK and create more strife. Honestly, a pretty good case can be made thatt this entire NC page can be merged into AT and into topical NC guidelines since nothing at all in it is is unique to this page.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ⚞(^Ʌⱷ҅̆_⚲͜ⱷ^{^})≼  08:49, 6 April 2014 (UTC)

Removed false promotion of a wikiproject essay as a "guideline"

Removed (for the second time) here. This needs no real consensus discussion; there cannot be a valid consensus to include blatant falsehoods in a guideline about what is and is not a guideline elsewhere. The error was added without announcing it or discussing it, here. There was no consensus for the change to begin with, not even an erroneous consensus.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ⚞(^Ʌⱷ҅̆_⚲͜ⱷ^{^})≼  08:22, 6 April 2014 (UTC)

It was reverted again, this time by Casliber, with an edit summary that doesn't even make sense in the context.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ⚞(^Ʌⱷ҅̆_⚲͜ⱷ^{^})≼  09:35, 6 April 2014 (UTC)

RfC (essay promotion)

{{rfc|style|policy|rfcid=73563BF}}

Restatement

Should an actual guideline, e.g. Wikipedia:Naming conventions (capitalization)#Organisms (WP:NCCAPS), refer[2] to an wikiproject essay as a "guideline" and link to it in a hatnote where the actual guideline defers to other actual guidelines, e.g. WP:Manual of Style, WP:Naming conventions (fauna), and WP:Naming conventions (flora)?

This is not about mention/linking of an essay in prose, as occurs in this case in the paragraph after the hatnote.

Objections were raised as to the neutrality level of the original wording. As of this writing, the change I sought has been unreverted, mooting the dispute potentially, but the RfC may be useful anyway. The discussion, to the extent there has been any that hasn't been about the neutrality wording, has also predictably shifted to disputes about WP:BIRDS#Naming and its rationales, instead of the questions raised by the RFC (deference of WP guidelines to wikiproject essays and mislabeling them as such).  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  00:22, 8 April 2014 (UTC)

Old version

Should WP:NCCAPS defer to a wikiproject essay that directly conflicts with WP:MOS, and promote that essay as a guideline? In more detail: Should Wikipedia:Naming conventions (capitalization)#Organisms continue, because some think there's a consensus to do so, to defer to a wikiproject essay at Wikipedia:WikiProject Birds#Naming that directly conflicts with Wikipedia:Manual of Style#Organisms, and continue to falsely promote that essay as a guideline, in a section that is supposed to simply be a summary of how Wikipedia:Manual of Style#Organisms, Wikipedia:Naming conventions (fauna)#Capitalisation and italicisation and Wikipedia:Naming conventions (flora)#Scientific versus vernacular names apply to capitalization in article titles?  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ⚞(Ʌⱷ҅̆⚲͜ⱷ^)≼  09:33, 6 April 2014 (UTC) Canvassing This RfC was misleadingly WP:CANVASSed, as an attack on bird name capitalization, here. I don't think there was any kind of bad faith; people just tend to jump to heated conclusions on these matters (thus WP:ARBATC).  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  00:41, 8 April 2014 (UTC)

"Defer" clarification

I note that defer means to delay or postpone (see Wiktionary). As far as I understand the word "defer" is not widely used (as least in the UK) being a word mainly used in the military. I think that more understandabler language should have been used in the introduction to this discussion. Snowman (talk) 08:39, 7 April 2014 (UTC)

The applicable definition appears below the Etymology 2 heading. UK-specific Google searches for "defer to" and "defers to" yield many relevant results. —David Levy 15:32, 7 April 2014 (UTC)

Indeed. And it's normal English, too, not some obscure regionalism.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  00:25, 8 April 2014 (UTC)

Editors' comments

• Local consensus cannot supersede consensus within the Wikipedia community at large. An essay doesn't magically become a guideline simply because a WikiProject (which possesses no special authority whatsoever, let alone ownership of articles in its scope) wishes to treat it as such. —David Levy 12:44, 6 April 2014 (UTC)

  The top of the page says "occasional exceptions may apply." Editors of bird articles have been capitalising for the duration of the wikiproject. All knowledgeable editors of bird articles prefer to do it this way. The only objectors in the main are SMcCandlish who seems to spend alot of time trying to tell and enforce other editors how to edit, and a handful of editors who don't actually edit bird articles. The capitalisation wasn't created on a whim but reflects usage outside wikipedia by official sources. The bird exception is currently located on the page currently, as is allowed by the nice little box at the top, and doesn't disagree with fauna currently either. Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 13:03, 6 April 2014 (UTC)

  The top of the page says "occasional exceptions may apply."
  Yes, exceptions exist. And like the guidelines themselves, they're subject to consensus. There has never been consensus for the exception in question.
  Editors of bird articles have been capitalising for the duration of the wikiproject.
  Indeed, the WikiProject decided that it has special authority to control the content of articles within its scope.
  All knowledgeable editors of bird articles prefer to do it this way.
  That simply isn't true. Most editors from WikiProject Birds (and perhaps most editors with avian expertise) prefer that style, but there isn't unanimity among them.
  Of course, that's beside the point. Editors of articles on all subjects are expected to either adhere to Wikipedia's style conventions or convince the community that an alternative is called for. Instead, WikiProject Birds treats "its" articles as Birdipedia.
  The only objectors in the main are SMcCandlish who seems to spend alot of time trying to tell and enforce other editors how to edit, and a handful of editors who don't actually edit bird articles.
  SMcCandlish is among the few editors whose patience somehow hasn't been exhausted. And again, an article's primary authors have no special authority to dictate its content. Some of us would be glad to edit the bird articles, but our changes would be reverted.
  The capitalisation wasn't created on a whim but reflects usage outside wikipedia by official sources.
  I don't assert that the capitalization was created on a whim. Certainly, countless specialist publications adhere to that style. Wikipedia isn't a specialist publication. It's a general encyclopedia.
  The bird exception is currently located on the page currently,
  Yes, we acknowledge that the situation exists. (As I recall, this was agreed upon in part because of a concern that failure to note the distinction would increase the likelihood of the practice spreading to other subject areas.) That doesn't validate it.
  as is allowed by the nice little box at the top,
  Again, said box doesn't negate the need for consensus.
  and doesn't disagree with fauna currently either.
  That page's content has been called into question as well. —David Levy 13:58, 6 April 2014 (UTC)

  To interject again, since I was mentioned by name: User:SMcCandlish/Capitalization of organism names proves that it's hardly just me and a handful of others, but editors from all walks of Wikipedian life who for roughly ten years have been consistently critical of this capitalized bird name stuff.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  02:33, 8 April 2014 (UTC)

  What, so if you were allowed to write uncapitalised bird names in articles you'd suddenly start contributing? Something as trivial as that stops you adding bird content? Right. Unlike webster's and EB, we cover all bird species - much more like IOC and goverment sources all of whom capitalise.

  The recent move review has had comments from 28 editors - which is more than I think I have ever seen comment at a capitalisation debate - usually these are argued by a handful of people at most with reams of text generated, at least all the ones I have seen over the past eight years or so, so I contend that either side speaking for the "community" or concluding they have comprehensive consensus is presumptuous at best. To settle this once and for all we should have a proper structured community-wide discussion, not a loaded comment that makes all the bird editors look like naughty schoolboys with their hands in the cookie jar. Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 14:13, 6 April 2014 (UTC)

  I have to interject here that nothing in this RfC is about whether to stop capitalizing birds, or is somehow casting aspersions on the wikiproject. This RfC is about deference of a guideline to an essay, and false labeling by the guidline of the essay as a guideline itself. I did in the original wording mention parenthetically that the essay directly conflicts with one of the other guidelines this guideline defers to and attempts to summarize, but that's a simple factual observation, not an attack, as far as good faith goes. It seemed relevant to the question of whether that particular essay should be cited here or anyway. On second thought (and after various neutrality-related encouragement), I took this out of the reworded version because it's not germane to the underlying questions, and factual or not, I concede that it posed a neutrality problem, by coloring the questions with an extraneous issue. I also have to observe that the entire RfC would not have been needed if not for WP:POINTy revertwarring, but that's another matter. I'm happy to see the RfC proceed (or a new one replace it, asking the same questions neutrally) because I think pretty much no one is going to come out in favor of guidelines deferring to essays and pretending they're guidelines too. That will surely have precedential value elsewhere.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  02:19, 8 April 2014 (UTC)

  You appear to have misunderstood my comment. I'm not a bird aficionado. I meant that I'm among those who would be willing to take on the sizable task of editing the articles to remove the aforementioned capitalization. But the articles' owners won't permit that.

  If I did happen to have material to contribute, I wouldn't allow my disagreement with the capitalization to stand in the way. In fact, I sometimes end up working on main page content related to birds (and I leave the capitalization in place).

  Conversely, I recall at least one prominent member of WikiProject Birds threatening to quit Wikipedia (and claiming that others would follow suit) if they were forced to stop capitalizing common bird names. I hope that we can agree that such a stance (from someone on either side of the debate) is excessive. Irrespective of how this turns out, Wikipedia will survive. —David Levy 14:47, 6 April 2014 (UTC)

  Well we can agree on that - I would no find myself too heartbroken to the point of stopping writing about birds, no. Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 20:13, 6 April 2014 (UTC)

  I have to concur with every point David Levy makes here. @Casliber: Surely you realize that bird experts will quit if they can't capitalize is in fact a frequently raised bogus "reason" to keep capitalizing (phrased in various ways, like suggesting that the MOS is hostile to valuable academic contributors, or failure to let WP:BIRDS have its way is a bad faith attempt to rid the project of expert, or having rules about style that conflict with specialist journals creates a negative environment that distracts professionals from useful contributions, or whatever weaselwording comes up at the time). Because of a recent warning in WP:ARCA to not drag the names of permanently missing (i.e. indef-blocked or right-to-vanish) users because they can't very well respond, I can't get as specific as I'd like here, but the log I've been building to track this sprawling issue links to cases of WP:BIRDS editors themselves threatening not just to quit but even calling for the staging of mass editorial strikes and walk-outs. Of course that noise never led to any such WP:POINTy antics, it was just heat to rile up the debate. The fact that people really are tired of this "we must capitalize or we'll lose valuable contributors" silliness is because of how frequently it's been advanced as if it's a rational concern, and even been used as a wikipolitical threat technique. There's no way we can, with straight faces, turn this history on its ear and propose that it's everyone else throughout Wikipedia, who pretty uniformly disagree with bird capitalization, that's playing these WP:DIVA-style "our style way or lots of us will hit the highway" ultimatums. I haven't seen such behavior lately from members of the birds project, but the untenable underlying "lack of capitalization would mean we lose experts" position was advanced more than once in these debates just yesterday.

  We cannot reasonably cite government sources as somehow authoritative on style, as they capitalize, boldface, italicize, all-cap, abbreviate, word-order-reverse, de-hyphenate, and otherwise do things with style, in so many substandard ways you could write a hilarious book about it. Government writing is pretty much the least reliable source for style in English writing, even if some govt. projects, properly funded and without political agendas, can produce reliable factual results.

  There are no "official sources" in ornithology. Even the IOC was not appointed by a world-ratified UN treaty, or God, or any other source of authority that makes it "official". That particular fallacy is one of the most tiresome in the entire debate.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  01:35, 8 April 2014 (UTC)

  Hmmm, no style guides are "official" either - just lots of well-meaning experts. Pointing out what one bird editor said in exasperation and trying to generalise it is at best unhelpful and could be construed as being deceitful. Of course that editor's behaviour is nothing like yours which seems to be one of anger if people don't follow the rules that you suggest they should follow....hmmm. Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 01:43, 8 April 2014 (UTC)

  No one's making an argument that any style guide is official in this debate. The boycott/walkout/resign stuff was not one editor, by multiple WP:BIRDS regulars at different points (only one of whom is disappeared). This isn't misconstruing a slip of the virtual tongue, it's observance of evidence of a pattern, a pattern that we have some guidelines and essays about because they are named and easily recognizable, frequent enough to address, and problematic enough to bother addressing. Opponents in any debate tend to seem angry and unreasonable to one another. That wikiproject in particular is seen as unusually entrenched, insular and combative, by lots of people. This RfC right off the bat is accusing it of WP:OWN and other anti-policy behaviors. This is not me being some hypocritical jerk, it's others members of the editing community telling the project that it's going too far, both on its own "turf" and in its efforts to steer these guideline pages to convey special WP:BIRDS favoritism.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  01:56, 8 April 2014 (UTC)

• No, WP:NCCAPS should not defer to a Wikiproject essay, nor promote that essay as a guideline. If at some future point some members of a Wikiproject convince the broader community that such action is right (per WP:LOCALCONSENSUS), it could then be noted both here and in the Wikiproject essays. -- JHunterJ (talk) 15:30, 6 April 2014 (UTC)
• I'm opposed in general to falsehoods, but didn't see where it continues "to falsely promote that essay as a guideline". ––Agyle (talk) 16:11, 6 April 2014 (UTC)

I just read the info above the RFC, and realized it's referring to the material removed here. I'd suggest choosing a different term in the link (e.g. "guide") to avoid confusion with an official guideline. ––Agyle (talk) 03:15, 7 April 2014 (UTC)

That would still miss half the point of the RfC. WP:NCCAPS is just a quick summary of where in the larger guidelines one can find rules on capitalization in article titles. The wikicontent under discussion here is where a multi-link hatnote is used to cite those guidelines from which NCCAPS derives the summary immediately below the hatnote. The birds wikiproject essay is not such a guideline and so has no business being in that hatnote.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  01:35, 8 April 2014 (UTC)

• An RfC statement should be neutrally worded. The wording on this is extremely biased. Can we correct the format of this RfC and clarify the wording with exactly what's being requested? 0x0077BE [^talk/_contrib] 03:28, 7 April 2014 (UTC)
• Wow talk about your biased, loaded, POV opening statements to an RfC. This needs to be closed, re-opened neutrally, and a trout delivered to the OP for so wildly attempting (unconsiously) to skew the discussion. - The Bushranger _{One ping only} 04:56, 7 April 2014 (UTC)

  While I agree with SMcCandlish, I can't deny that the RfC's wording is far from neutral. A second try might not be a bad idea. —David Levy 07:31, 7 April 2014 (UTC)

• I think that the wording of the statement that started this discussion is somewhat complex. I think that it should be re-written and re-started to enhanced clarity, if the proposer wishes to persevere with his idea. Snowman (talk) 08:51, 7 April 2014 (UTC)
• I agree that the question should be rewritten and the RfC restarted. The question is: "Should the guideline contain a link to WikiProject Birds naming guidelines at the top of the Organisms section, as in this version?" SlimVirgin ^(talk) 15:39, 7 April 2014 (UTC)

  Probably better if someone else does it then as I don't think SMcCandlish is able to see it as non-neutral wording. Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 20:01, 7 April 2014 (UTC)

  Thanks for the WP:AGF, there.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  23:49, 7 April 2014 (UTC)

  This coming from someone who writes this with a link to this in it....but let's take this at face value - why don't you try to rewrite this neutrally? Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 00:59, 8 April 2014 (UTC)

  Actually, you made what seems to be a mental deficiency argument, so it's really a WP:NPA not WP:AGF matter. Going after me personally here is not in any way comparable to an essay that takes a somewhat lampooning position with regard to a class of arguments regardless who is making them. Nothing at WP:SSF is about you or any project in particular, and its talk page tracks numerous disparate cases unrelated to birds or capitalization at all. ANYWAY, Do you have some neutrality objection to the restated wording?  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  01:44, 8 April 2014 (UTC)

• I of course, as nominator, do not believe that this section should have a hatnote linking to an essay at a wikiproject page, nor that it should, anywhere, refer to it as a guideline. I don't have a problem with the RFC being re-opened or reworded, but SlimVirgin's version is worse than mine, since it studiously avoids both of the entire points of the RfC: the false promotion of the essay as a guideline, and the crucial distinction between this actual guideline deferring to that essay in a hatnote with the authoritative guidelines, and simply mentioning or linking to the essay in context in the prose, which is not being objected to in that regard.

  I posted a restatement that I hope will work, but I note that I've been unreverted on the WP:NCCAPS change anyway, so this is at least temporarily moot. I won't reopen a new RfC unless someone thinks that would be useful.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  00:13, 8 April 2014 (UTC) clarified 01:44, 8 April 2014 (UTC)

• Regarding the 2014-04-07 restatement: Y on the first part of the question (don't refer to essays as guidelines here), and Y on the second part of the question (don't include a WP:BIRDS link in the hatnote in the current version of the guideline). With the link to WP:BIRDS already in the short section a couple lines later, as well as in the hatlinked WP:FAUNA guideline, it doesn't seem additionally helpful to readers to duplicate the link in the hatlink. Agyle (talk) 02:02, 8 April 2014 (UTC)

• Confused – I don't quite follow either the original or the restatement, but I think it's plain what the problem is. The birders (and sometimes dog breeders and astronomers) like to capitalize the official terms in their fields, while non-specialists usually don't. When the discussion of such things is centralized, as at MOS, the desire for a normal consistent style usually wins, and when such discussions are had in more specialist venues the specialists get their way. So what should we do about it? We had a longstanding uneasy truce with the birders using their caps on ornithology-related pages, but not pushing that into more general pages, but that hasn't proved to be stable, nor really satisfying to anybody. If we centralize discussion such that we get the widest possible participation, the idea of centralizing guidance via the MOS is usually more supported than the idea of letting wikiprojects define their own style guidelines. Is this RFC trying to go so far as to force such a showdown with the birders? Or just to settle on how better to co-exist with them? I can't quite figure it out. Either way, the MOS should probably represent itself as the main authority on styling, and if there are exceptions they should be acknowledged as exceptions to, not applications of, the MOS. Dicklyon (talk) 03:37, 8 April 2014 (UTC)

Dicklyon, I was confused at first too. It actually has nothing to do with how to capitalize things, it's only about how this guideline (WP:NCCAPS) should link to WP:BIRDS in one of its sections. This edit touched off a dispute of whether to link it once or twice in the section (one link was in the WP:HATLINK, the other in the section text), and what to call the linked WP:BIRDS link (it used the word "guideline", and is not an official guideline). ––Agyle (talk) 04:28, 8 April 2014 (UTC)

Right, but it's about how to relate to the birds project exception. Certainly I agree that that should not be called a guideline. And it should not be "deferred to". We could perhaps anknowledge that that project promotes their own exception for ornithology articles. Hopefully in a way that doesn't give the birds project undue authority over general articles. Dicklyon (talk) 04:41, 8 April 2014 (UTC)

The prose below the hatnote already does acknowledge the WP:BIRDS preference (overly – it does so in a way that conflicts with MOS's approach to that question, which was the result of a very long discussion in early 2012 that was actually dominated by people from the birds project anyway). This RfC has nothing to do with settling the dispute about "bird caps" one way or the other, or even fixing that textual disparity with MOS; only the treating-an-essay-as-a-guideline issues. Not every time someone (even me) raises an issue or makes an edit that happens to cross into "bird caps territory" is it necessarily about yes-or-no on capitalization. :-) This was about exactly what Agyle says. I strenuously agree with you that the higher-level question needs to be resolved and in a way that does not give any wikiproject undue authority of any kind, over any articles or categories, but that wasn't intended to be this discussion. I started the RfC because a clear "no we don't" result against treating any wikiproject's essays as guidelines, especially controversial ones that go against real guidelines, would be a useful thing to be able to refer to in other contexts; WP:LOCALCONSENSUS policy somehow doesn't seem to be getting the point across well enough on its own.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  07:18, 8 April 2014 (UTC)

• I would like to re-iterate my concern about this RFC. I think it should be closed and if necessary a new RfC should be started in a new section below. Most of the discussion in this RfC was generated by the original, biased wording, and now there's a big statement still in the header about how there was inappropriate canvassing "mischaracterizing" this RfC. In fact, it is not inappropriate to notify Wikiproject: Birds that something intimately related to their wikiproject is under discussion here, and as far as I can tell the only reason it was originally mischaracterized over there was because SMcCandlish's vague and biased wording was confusing to the user doing the notification (in fact the notification even specified that the user was confused about the exact nature of the RfC). Re-phrasing the RfC statement after everyone's already come in and given their assessments is closing the barn door after the horses have all gotten out, and adding the ridiculous canvassing notice is just poor form. 0x0077BE [^talk/_contrib] 06:33, 8 April 2014 (UTC)

  Notifying a project isn't canvassing. Doing so in an alarmist "call to arms" manner is. I hatted the canvassing notice and old version of the question, because my change to the alarmist heading in the project notice wasn't reverted. I have no real objection to relisting the RfC with the neutral wording, as long as parties who commented the first time are notified. But I think it could be a perceived as a WP:POINTy waste of time, because the odds of an RfC concluding differently with the more neutral, narrowed wording are very low – no one is liable to support calling an essay a guideline, or having a guideline defer to an essay as authoritative in contradicting another guideline. The original RfC was about this specific case, but that case has been effectively mooted by removing the material at issue, and the wording had to be generalized to get rid of the neutrality issues, so it's kind of over already.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  07:18, 8 April 2014 (UTC)

Regardless of whether the question has been mooted, this RfC should be closed and archived as no consensus. If it's now a moot point and there is no opposition to the change, then a second RfC is obviously unnecessary. These are two separate issues. 0x0077BE [^talk/_contrib] 04:34, 9 April 2014 (UTC)

It's not "obviously unnecessary"; that's the real question. It might be seen as POINTy to re-open it, or it might be a useful exercise in answering the generalized questions. I've disabled the RfC tag, which effectively closes it, but it definitely should not be closed as "no consensus" (a finding of fact that there is no consensus, which is not really true), but as an invalid RfC because its neutrality was disputed by a high percentage of its respondents. I'm inclined to not re-open it, because there's a much bigger discussion now at WT:MOS about the larger issues relating to this entier section and its' conflicts with MOS and other guidelines. Centralizing discussion is a virtue. I'm further disinclined to keep going on about this now-moot RfC, per WP:NOT#BUREAUCRACY.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  23:11, 9 April 2014 (UTC)

Use same wording as NCFAUNA & MOS

This page is using non-consensus wording that contradicts both WP:NCFAUNA and WP:MOS to which it defers. It's just made up, POV-pushing blather. I fixed this here:

Common names of species generally do not have each word capitalized, except where proper nouns appear (maple tree, zebra, but Przewalski's horse). WP:WikiProject Birds arrived at a local consensus to recommend using IOC naming, which (generally) capitalizes each word. Where more than one capitalization is possible, redirects should be created from the alternative form(s). For details, see the topic-specific pages listed above.

but it got reverted by SlimVirgin in her mass-revert of everything I did here. Are there any substantive objections to getting NCCAPS to stop contracting these other guidelines for not reason?  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ⚞(^Ʌⱷ҅̆_⚲͜ⱷ^{^})≼  08:53, 6 April 2014 (UTC)

Can't just ignore what people have been doing and dismiss them all as incorrect. Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 09:03, 6 April 2014 (UTC)

Not responsive to the issue, and the link doesn't even pertain to this, but to falsely promoting an essay as a guideline.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ⚞(^Ʌⱷ҅̆_⚲͜ⱷ^{^})≼  09:16, 6 April 2014 (UTC)

The link doesn't falsely promote anything, just links to what the editors of bird articles have been doing across 9000 articles. You can't just dismiss that. Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 09:49, 6 April 2014 (UTC)

Again, this has nothing to do with the topic, which is about having WP:NCCAPS#Organisms use the same wording as corresponding sections at WP:NCFAUNA and MOS:LIFE). I think you're having an off-by-one error, and are looking for the thread above this one, which is now an RfC, because this tag-team revertwarring is not going to resolve anything.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ⚞(^Ʌⱷ҅̆_⚲͜ⱷ^{^})≼  10:03, 6 April 2014 (UTC)

Labeling an essay a "guideline" (and listing it among actual guidelines) most definitely promotes a falsehood. —David Levy 12:44, 6 April 2014 (UTC)

Proposal: Stop trying to reinterpret the other, conflicting guidelines here

The simplest solution to all of the related problems on this page (see above mess) are to turn the entire section in question, WP:Naming conventions (capitalization)#Organisms, into the following:

Organisms

See: Wikipedia:Manual of Style's "Animals, plants, and other organisms" section, as well as Wikipedia:Naming conventions (fauna)'s "Capitalisation and italicisation" section, and Wikipedia:Naming conventions (flora)'s "Guidelines" section.

I.e., do not try to reinterpret and synthesize these guidelines (which still conflict to this day) here at NCCAPS, just turn the hatnote of cross-references to the guidelines into a non-hatnote (with clearer links), and that's the entire section. Because WP:NCCAPS isn't really a guideline per se but summary of capitalization style guidelines as they apply to article titles, arguably the only sane thing to do here is link editors to where the conflicting guidelines are, and let them do their best to interpret them, until those conflicts are resolved (and in most cases there is no conflict at all). Unless and until the conflicts are resolved, any attempt at interpretation here is doomed to being a POV-pushing exercise that does nothing but generate an extra layer of disputation. The summary here kind of sucked anyway, even aside from conflicts, because it didn't address all kinds of more detailed stuff covered at NCFAUNA and NCFLORA. As it is now, doesn't serve anyone's interests. If at a later date it's determined that a summary would be helpful here after all, one could be redone from scratch collaboratively.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  07:41, 8 April 2014 (UTC)

I don't see any opposition to this proposal after an entire week. It was actually already agreed to by consensus years ago, BTW: Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (capitalization)/Archive 1#Fauna. We have five guidelines with conflicting language, so let's just fix one of them right now (and not by changing what it advising, just stopping it from advising something different).  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  23:58, 15 April 2014 (UTC)

Over-specificity and redundancy correction

One of Shyamal's big changes was not controversial, and I restored and tweaked it here, but it got clobbered again when SlimVirgin blanket reverted all my changes here.

It changed Common names of species generally do not have each word capitalized... to Common names of species and of general types of organisms do not have each word capitalized...; i.e. it corrected the unhelpful over-specificity of "species" (a restriction that MOS itself did not impose - it's unclear where it came from in NCCAPS), and also removed a redundant, repetitive word (it would just be poor writing to say something applies "generally" when you immediately spell out how it doesn't apply, or to use a "...general...generally..." pattern in the same sentence).

So, again, does anyone have an actual substantive objection to the change?  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ⚞(^Ʌⱷ҅̆_⚲͜ⱷ^{^})≼  09:05, 6 April 2014 (UTC)

Not from me. Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 12:52, 6 April 2014 (UTC)

I would prefer that the word generally not be removed from "Common names of species generally do not have each word capitalized." (Removing it was one of SMcCandlish's changes, [3] not one of Shyamal's. [4]) It signals that what follows is not a hard-and-fast rule, which seems to matter given the context. SlimVirgin ^(talk) 15:09, 6 April 2014 (UTC)

I agree with SlimVirgin, "generally" is appropriate if there are exceptions, and I agree with Cas Liber that two uses of "general" would be nice to avoid. However, expansion to cover names of general types (groups? categories?) of organisms seems fine. Perhaps Common names of species and of categories of species generally do not have each word capitalized...? ––Agyle (talk) 17:17, 6 April 2014 (UTC)

On this topic, I would think that it is best to avoid dogmatic community-wide guidelines or policies that could be quoted too zealously. Snowman (talk) 09:56, 7 April 2014 (UTC)

I observe that this particular wording change discussion is equally applicable to WP:NCFAUNA#Common (vernacular) names (which says "normally" instead of "generally", an even weirder weaselwording) and theoretically WP:NCFLORA, which is not beset with this problem, but the talk page of which has some rewording proposals. I'll at least link the NCFAUNA talk page to this thread, to centralize discussion. I'm also suggesting in a proposal elsewhere on this page to replace the whole "Organisms" section of WP:NCCAPS with pointers to the guidelines the page is trying, very poorly, to synthesize and summarize. So, what we're talking about here might end up being only applicable to NCFAUNA.

Anyway, I cannot agree that "generally" helps "signal that what follows isn't a hard-and-fast rule" when what follows is a rule and what some assert to be an exception [an idea that in this case is very hotly disputed and thus best entirely avoided on this page, as I suggest elsewhere]. Ignoring the dispute entirely for a moment, I don't need to say "I generally don't eat meat, except scallops" when "I don't eat meat, except scallops" will do, and it certainly will do; the longer construction is simply redundant. Use of "generally" in this particular context is especially inappropriate because it serves to surreptitiously inject a sense of unbounded wiggle-room, when there is certainly no consensus that our guidelines are in fact that vague and optional. One editor's "dogmatic" and "zealous" (sure you don't want to throw in a "psychotic" or "evil", too?) is another's simple consistency and taking of policies and guidelines at face value.

Severably, the Common names of species and of categories of species [generally] do not... wording doesn't work, because it's not just categories of species, but of any sort of general assemblage or categorization - of genera, or of varieties or breeds below subspecies, of all members of an entire kingdom, or whatever. The "organisms" part was important. "Categories" also has a specific meaning on WP, and could lead to confusion. The extra "of" in the reworked construction isn't needed any longer. So, maybe Common names of species and other categorizations of organisms [generally] do not..., with my 10x stronger preference for the version without "generally", which is poor and weaselly writing.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  08:55, 8 April 2014 (UTC)

I'm confused about which rule you're applying here. You don't (I assume) want to write Hispanic, Causasian, French, the Alps, with lower case, but you do want us to write Scottish terrier, not Scottish Terrier or scottish terrier. SlimVirgin ^(talk) 16:53, 8 April 2014 (UTC)

@SlimVirgin: What's your basis for that assumption? Whether to capitalize names of formal breeds of animals is an open question, with no site-wide consensus at all, and the rationales for it are actually quite different than for species capitalization; it's a mostly unrelated issue, and not intended to be addressed in this section, or the corresponding material in any of these pages. I'm personally on the fence about it and have elsewhere tried writing up an actual defense of the practice. If you remove your assumption that I'm trying to decapitalize dog breed names, are you still suffering from any confusion such as you reported?  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  23:01, 9 April 2014 (UTC)

Hi SMcCandlish, my question was about which rule (or style book) you're following. All the ones I've looked at so far (I still have a few to go) admit of exceptions, and in particular mention companion animals and birds. So I was asking where you took the position that there ought never to be an exception. (I don't know why we would treat a breed differently from a species; that takes us into ever more byzantine rules.) I suppose what I'm asking is that you cite your source. This is something I think the MoS ought always to do, but in this case it would be particularly helpful given that we can't reach consensus ourselves. SlimVirgin ^(talk) 02:46, 10 April 2014 (UTC)

I don't need to cite a source that "categories of species" doesn't work, or that "generally"/"normaly" being used to indicate exception to something followed immediately by actually listing exceptions, is redundant. Let's focus here: The logic of having nothing, or worse yet the phrase "categories of species" (which doesn't even make sense as a phrase, really, except if you mean "genus", which you don't), vs. having something like "general categories of organisms", and this guideline being editwarred into POVforking from MOS, is what we're talking about. "Which rule you're applying" is a non sequitur; there is no external source under discussion right now, or anything that requires one, and style decisions on Wikipedia are based on consensus, not picking an external style guide to copy. That consensus first and foremost is based on the question "what is most helpful for the largest number of our readers?" Secondarily, it's based on what mainstream general-audience publications with editorial staff, like dictionaries, other encyclopedias, and newspapers, do. Tertiarily, it's based on what mainstream reliable sources on English language style and usage recommend in general-audience writing, where they don't conflict with each other (as they so often do; for almost any style "rule" in the real world there are actually multiple conflict rules, and they usually aren't even an ENGVAR issue but a "register" or context issue, e.g. academic vs. professional vs. journalistic style.) Specialist sources are considered only to the extent they do not conflict with the MOS consensus process's more important concerns, because they frequently do wildly ungrammatical things, and every specialization wants wildly ungrammatical things that are different from the wildly ungrammatical things of the next specialty over.

This is not the place to get into why formal breeds and cultivars may end up being treated differently than species common names (and they certainly are more often capitalized in off-WP sources than species, so editors do make arguments to do so here). The relevant thing for this particular discussion is that they are highly specific "types of organisms", with conformance standards, etc., not "general types", so the wording change would not affect them. If you think that we have too many and "ever more byzantine rules", stop pushing for capitalizing bird capitalization, then, since the logical and even WP:RS base for it is severely faulty, no one wants it but maybe a dozen or two dozen editors almost all confined to one project, it's a serious impediment to all other editors, it confuses readers, it leads to constant strife, and it leads to false capitalization of other organisms and other things in general, because few editors actually read MOS in enough detail to see the instruction to not do that; they simply copy what they see in one article and apply it to another.

You're also reacting from a false basis here, that removal of "generally"/"normally" would mean there can be no variances from the general rule. Please re-read and think again about it. Neither word is needed because the clause is followed by one or more variances!

Addressing attempt to change the subject

However, if wanted to change topics and talk about what external sources do, you should go first. I have a rather extensive collection of such books (and electronic ones), and so far as I've seen (and I'm sure you know I've been looking, for a long time) there are no style, grammar and writing guides pertaining to the English language that say to capitalize bird common names; only ornithological sources say to do that, and even then only some of them (some ornithology journals do not actually use the capitalization; the insistence by some that it's a universal convention in ornithology is a patent falsehood, as WP:BIRDS well knows. I link to WT:BIRDS archives admitting this several times, in User:SMcCandlish/Capitalization of organism names). There is certainly no consensus that MOS should cite sources! A totally unworkable idea. It is not an article, it's a WP-internal guideline, created by us for our encyclopedia. It does not require any citations at all, only the reasoning we come to consensus on as an editorial community. If you think that Wikipedians should create a descriptive not prescriptive style guide, that's probably a good project for WikiBooks. Anyway, I cannot imagine what you are referring to when you say "All the ones I've looked at so far" aren't in favor of lower case. In 10 years of looking for any style/grammar guides recommending capitalizing common names of species, no one on either side of the debate has ever been able to cite even a single one. Hart's (now Oxford) as well as Chicago, the two biggies, certainly do not suggest such capitalization. I have CMoS right here in front of me, coincidentally, so here you go: "Sec. 8: Names and Terms; subsec. 8.136, Common names: [...] In general, Chicago recommends capitalizing only proper nouns and adjectives, as in the following examples, which conform to Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary. It then lists examples (my emphasis added): "Dutchman's-breeches, mayapple, jack-in-the-pulpit, rhesus monkey, Rocky Mountain sheep, Cooper's hawk". So, Chicago Manual of Style is for lower-casing bird common names, explicitly. Oh, it also defers specifically to the ICBN and ICZN, the nomenclature authorities for botany and zoology generally (in case they come up with a rule), but neither now nor when the current ed. of CMoS was published did either of them impose any such style rule. the ICN (which CMoS doesn't cite but probably should, since it covers the stuff that aren't plants or animals) says it best: "[T]ypography is a matter of editorial style and tradition not of nomenclature." The ICBN and ICZN clearly agree in practice, since they set no standard at all; they know full well that all sorts of journals, encyclopedias, magazines, whathaveyou, all have their own in-house style guides and that such style rules for different audiences have nothing at all to do with scientific nomenclature. I've already cited these and many other such sources, as have others (DickLyon, Noetica, etc.) every time the debate arises, but the capitalizers simply play WP:IDIDNTHEARTHAT games, and recycle the same arguments a month or a year later as if they were not already addressed. Anyway, I actually did cite some sources first, and more in a section for them at my userspace page that I just gave you the link to (again). So, now it's definitely your turn to put up. Let's see quotes from "[a]ll the one's [you]'ve looked at so far". If you don't have them handy, then just titles and authors will do. After you provide your sources or find that you don't actually have any, then if you really want I can cite more, though I think that effort is better spent sourcing for a bigger discussion now ongoing at WT:MOS, where all of this stuff really belongs.

• To get back to the topic that was actually under discussion:

1. No one actually objected to clarifying with "and of general types of organisms". (SlimVirgin simply expressed some confusion about it, which has been addressed.) Casliber supported, and remember that I was actually reinstating someone else's idea from over a month ago that I accidentally over-reverted. No one else seems to care, and four days is long enough to play "do I have consensus to make a really trivial change" games. I'm putting that edit back, because it's necessary, and the revert has not been justified. The only thing like an actual concern raised was that it might be misinterpreted to indicate decapitalization of dog breeds, but those are way more specific than species, not "general types", and we have no special consensus on dogs anyway, so it would be a moot questions even if it weren't assuaged.
2. I've demonstrated that "generally"/"normally" in the constructions in question is redundant. No one has refuted this. Let's briefly repeat the argument to date, since we got distracted with off-topic stuff about external sources and dog breeds and stuff. The only reason given (in different wording by two editors) for the revert was that such a word "is appropriate if there are exceptions" (Agyle), i.e. it "signals that what follows is not a hard-and-fast rule" (SlimVirgin), and I then demonstrated that it doesn't serve this function at all when followed by actual variances from the stated rule: "I don't eat meat, except scallops" is precisely equivalent to, but more precise than and less likely to be misinterpreted than "I usually, normally don't eat meat, except scallops". One would say either "I don't eat meat, except scallops" or "I normally [or usually] don't eat meat", but not a redundant mishmash of both. Snowmanradio stated a general principle (in bad-faith-assumptive terms of dogmatic zealotry); that principle is already being respected more than it should be by virtue of the fact that the wording here is already over-permissive and conflicting in that permissiveness with MOS, which is the controlling guideline on style matters. So, I am also separately restoring this edit. Again, 4 days is more than enough time to raise an objection that's not easily dispelled. On the off chance someone wants to revert it again, be careful to not revert other edits this time, please.

 — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  11:00, 10 April 2014 (UTC)

Hi, please don't remove "generally" again over objections (it's better to let people express a view just once, rather than making them repeat it on pain of being ignored if they don't). "I don't eat meat, except scallops" is poor writing. "I generally don't eat meat, but I make an exception for scallops" is better. SlimVirgin ^(talk) 19:10, 10 April 2014 (UTC)

Hi, please don't stall progress on guideline cleanup by raising another non-substantive pseudo-objection. One editor doesn't get to WP:FILIBUSTER changes forever without defending their objection on the basis of policy, reliable sources or logic and common sense. You've just just made a WP:ILIKEIT argument, nothing more. I repeat that there is no objection. The original editor who made this change supported it, of course,; I support it. Casliber supports it (and the two of us agreeing is not common). You expressed confusion about it, and now make a procedural point that isn't even valid, not a substantive one. SlimVirgin understanding why something is happening isn't a requirement for something to happen. So, from where I sit there's a clear consensus to proceed (at both pages, BTW; discussion about this at the other has been clearly directed here).

PS, re: the "scallops" analogy. Why do you think your long-winded version "is better"? By what measure? Most writing guides would disagree with you, and would advise strongly against adding such unnecessary wording. I actually should have written the example as "I don't eat meat, except for scallops", I'll admit; I was in a hurry and forgot the "for". It doesn't affect the analogy in any way, though my self-correction weakens your case further. I'm skeptical anyone would agree that the doubly redundant and pointlessly tumid "I generally don't eat meat, but I make an exception for scallops" is in any way preferable to "I don't eat meat, except for scallops", unless as dialogue for the Bulwer-Lytton Contest.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  00:17, 16 April 2014 (UTC)

Outcome

The consensus is now clear. The relevant pages will soon be checked and made consistent with Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style#Bird common name decapitalisation.

H. H. Wander Strata (talk) 08:22, 3 May 2014 (UTC).

Formal job titles, formal certification titles, and degree names

In the archives, I see a prior discussion of Assistant stage manager, but I'm looking for guidance about capitalization for the titles of articles about more formal job titles, formal certification titles, and names of scholarly degrees. I have not found specific guidance. If no explicit guidance is currently provided in Wikipedia guidelines, I suggest that we add some. There is an ongoing move discussion about this at Talk:Registered professional accountant. Here are a few relevant examples of current article titles:

• Chief executive officer, Chief operating officer, Chief financial officer, Chief technology officer, Chief information officer, Chief investment officer
• Certified Financial Planner, Certified General Accountant, Chartered Accountant, Chartered Professional Accountant, Certified Public Accountant, Certified Management Accountant
• Certified Television Operator, Certified Novell Administrator, Microsoft Certified Professional, Apple Certified Desktop Technician, Cisco Career Certifications
• Certified management consultant, Certified first responder, Registered professional accountant, Licensed practical nurse, Registered nurse, Nurse practitioner, Clinical nurse specialist, Advanced practice registered nurse, Certified teacher
• Bachelor of Arts, Diploma of Education, Master of Engineering, Doctor of Philosophy, Doctor of Education, Postgraduate Certificate in Education, Master of Science in Nursing, Juris Doctor
• Doctor of law, High school diploma

A suggested interpretation is that the title of an article about a job title ordinarily would not have every word capitalized, but the title of an article about a specific academic degree or certification qualification ordinarily would (or at least often would) have every word capitalized.

—BarrelProof (talk) 18:25, 15 April 2014 (UTC)

A Google survey of some terms suggests the following trends among some mainstream newspapers:

• Professional titles like "chief executive officer" are almost never capitalized when they refer to people, unless as a title immediately preceding the person's name (e.g., "Chief Executive Smith"), but may or may not be capitalized when referring to an exam, certification, designation, or class (e.g., "Joe is a certified public accountant", but "Joe is studying for the Certified Public Accountant exam".) The only exception was in the Times of India, which capitalized with no discernible rules.

• Educational degrees (e.g., Bachelor of Arts) show significant variability, with no dominant, consistent pattern.

• President of the United States (not immediately preceding a name) uses president uncapitalized in North American papers, but is inconsistently capitalized outside of North America.

Here's a tally of the first ten google hits. I counted capitalization in headlines only when they used mixed case, and I omitted press releases, ads, other non-article results, and uses of a term just in a list of terms. I used the terms chief executive officer, certified public accountant, microsoft certified system(s) engineer, bachelor of arts, and president of the United States.

	CEO	CPA	MCSE	BA	POTUS
New York Times	8 lc, 0 UC	10 lc, 0 UC	2 lc, 0 UC	5 lc, 4 UC	7 lc, 0 UC
Los Angeles Times	9 lc, 0 UC	9 lc, 0 UC	3 lc, 0 UC	9 lc, 1 UC	10 lc, 0 UC
Washington Post	7 lc, 0 UC	10 lc, 0 UC	0 lc, 1 UC[3]	6 lc, 3 UC[6]	4 lc, 0 UC
The WSJ	10 lc, 0 UC	9 lc, 1 UC[1]	0 lc, 2 UC[1][5]	6 lc, 4 UC	8 lc, 1 UC[5]
Toronto Star	10 lc, 0 UC	8 lc, 2 UC[1]	0 lc, 0 UC	6 lc, 4 UC	10 lc, 0 UC
Melbourne Herald Sun	10 lc, 0 UC	3 lc, 0 UC	0 lc, 0 UC	2 lc, 8 UC	2 lc, 8 UC
The Guardian (UK)	10 lc, 0 UC	5 lc, 0 UC[2]	0 lc, 1 UC	7 lc, 3 UC	7 lc, 3 UC
Times of India	7 lc, 3 UC[4]	5 lc, 0 UC	2 lc, 5 UC	3 lc, 5 UC	3 lc, 6 UC

• ^[1] Toronto Star and WSJ seem to use lowercase when referring to a person ("Jim is a certified public accountant"), but uppercase when referring to the exam, designation, degree ("Jim is studying for his Certified Public Accountant exam/certification").
• ^[2] Didn't count upper case use of CPA in a legal disclaimer at the end of a Guardian article as part of the article.
• ^[3] Washington Post used upper case referring to an MSCE class, not a person.
• ^[4] Didn't count a Times of India article that used both within same sentence ("...Apple Chief Executive Officer Steve Jobs and former Google chief executive officer Eric Schmidt.")
• ^[5] WSJ used upper case in two cases where were quoting a written source, possibly retaining capitalization that they wouldn't ordinarily.
• ^[6] Washington Post in 2 of 3 uppercase uses of Bachelor of Arts used it when it was followed with a further description (e.g., "in Urban Studies").

The WSJ will use uppercase for a title before a person's name, like "Chief Executive Jim Smith said...", but not after the name "Jim Smith, the chief executive, said..." (Example article with both styles).

Agyle (talk) 05:17, 16 April 2014 (UTC)

I think this might be the wrong page for this discussion; this deals primarily with article titles, with the general guidance being to follow the capitalization used in articles. I think your question deals more with capitalization within the articles, which is covered in MOS:CAPS. I think it's a good question, and isn't addressed well there, I'd just suggest moving further discussion to that talk page.

If an article covers different topics with the same name, for example "certified public accountant" might discuss both CPA exams and people who work as CPAs, and the term is capitalized differently depending on that usage, then how to capitalize the article title will be unclear, but I think should be decided on a case-by-case basis.

––Agyle (talk) 21:55, 16 April 2014 (UTC)

Actually, I am more focused on article titles rather than usage within articles. I suppose the current guidance is for the titles to follow what is found in running text within articles, but I think this is rather confusing and has resulted in less consistency than would be desirable. I personally think it would be reasonable to say that the titles of articles about specific academic degrees and specific certification qualifications should use "title case" (as these are basically equivalent to proper nouns in that the capitalization makes it clear that we are talking about one specific qualification rather than a general description of a type of role) and the titles of articles about job roles should use "sentence case" – it seems that this is the typical practice already. To me it seems like having a few specific guidelines for article titles would improve consistency, while consistent use in running text within articles is less easy to achieve and also less important. Looking at the list above, I somewhat wonder why articles about certifications held by nurses seem to get less capitalization than those held by financial and technology professionals, for example – and can find no rational basis for that. The names of specific university degrees all seem to already use "title case" (except Doctor of law). I'm surprised at the inconsistency you report finding in well-respected publications. But here I am talking about the titles of articles about the qualification itself, not mentions of the qualification in passing as part of the discussion of some other topic. I think more consistency may be found in that context. —BarrelProof (talk) 00:29, 17 April 2014 (UTC)

I would disagree; it's fundamentally a WP:MOS matter, and trickles down to AT/NC like all style matters do. Why would we decide "LC job title in text, LC job title in article name, LC degree title in text, but UC degree title in article name"? Having AT/NC pages make up their own styles rules for no real reason is how we end up with inconsistencies and sometimes with nasty, years-long disputes. I can't think of any reasonable case for upper case in title but lower case in running text (and course not vice-versa). PS: Any time one is making an argument that supposes that something is "basically equivalent to proper nouns" or "just like a proper name" one is making a grievous linguistic error.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  11:34, 22 April 2014 (UTC)

Clearly, I am no linguistics expert. But what I have suggested seems roughly consistent with most Wikipedia article usage and with what is described above as the approach used in the Toronto Star and Wall Street Journal. —BarrelProof (talk) 16:15, 22 April 2014 (UTC)

There's nothing special about those two sources. And when MOS itself isn't providing clear enough instructions, then what WP articles are doing isn't necessarily indicative of anything at all.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  12:49, 3 May 2014 (UTC)

A couple of general points.

• theguardian (yes, that's the style of its masthead) is not a good guide to general UK practice as it's a self-declared exponent of maximum lower-casing.
• There are some ENGVAR issues here. For example, generally British sources are more likely to upper-case titles used to name specific individuals (hence "the President of the United States" – which, incidentally, is a non-prototypical proper name, as per "the White House") and degree titles. However, there's enough variability that it would, in my view, be sensible and useful to clarify and then stick to a general rule.

Peter coxhead (talk) 08:49, 3 May 2014 (UTC)

The Guardian is terribly problematic in a lot of style ways, including avoidance of hyphenation, commas and stops/periods that a lot of other publishers would consider mandatory. I agree that a general rule is best here. More discussion, perhaps over at WT:MOS itself, would be a good idea, with perhaps an RfC to close it.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  12:49, 3 May 2014 (UTC)

technical Q TotT vs. Tott

I don't understand why typing Tott takes me straight to TotT instead, or even how to create a separate redirect page, assuming someone might find the anagram worth keeping. Any explanations of what's going on please? Sparafucil (talk) 09:01, 13 May 2014 (UTC)

• Tott doesn't exist yes. If you click on that red link, it will take you to the "Creating" page, where you can make a redirect or article (or dab page). When the same-caps version isn't found, the Wikipedia software finds a caps-variant title to use instead, when you're using the Search bar. -- JHunterJ (talk) 10:39, 13 May 2014 (UTC)

Thanks! Sparafucil (talk) 01:28, 14 May 2014 (UTC)

Not only proper nouns

Do not capitalize the second or subsequent words in an article title, unless the title is a proper noun.

I disagree. If an article is titled Theory of Germanically influenced locutions in modern African languages, you have an adverb, "Germanically", and an adjective, "African", that should both have capital initial letters. The rule should say Do not capitalize the second or subsequent words in an article title, unless they would be capitalized for some reason other than being in an article title. Nor should it say "unless they would always be capitalized: there may be a particular occasion for capitalization that would apply in the context in question but not in all contexts. Michael Hardy (talk) 18:12, 14 May 2014 (UTC)

The second sentence seems to address your concern: "For multiword page titles, one should leave the second and subsequent words in lowercase unless the title phrase is a proper noun that would always occur capitalized, even in the middle of a sentence." Although common sense would indicate that African and Germanic are derived from proper nouns, and thus capitalized, perhaps it should be stated clearly in the second sentence, such as "For multiword page titles, one should leave the second and subsequent words in lowercase unless the word is a proper noun or would otherwise always occur capitalized, even in the middle of a sentence." Also, I don't think every possibility of words in all contexts needs to be mentioned (at least not up front), as the existing banner clearly states occasional exceptions may apply.--Animalparty-- (talk) 18:39, 29 May 2014 (UTC)

I think that was Michael Hardy's point: we shouldn't list every possible reason to capitalize words in a title, or just one, we should just say "unless they would be capitalized for some reason other than being in an article title". Since there are several exceptions to proper nouns, that does seem preferable. (I think month names, scientific genus names, and abbreviations, for example, are not proper nouns, but are generally capitalized). Agyle (talk) 23:16, 29 May 2014 (UTC)

The simplest instruction is "use sentence case", i.e. capitalize precisely as though the title were a complete sentence in English, as opposed to "use title case", in which extra initial capitals are used. Peter coxhead (talk) 08:44, 30 May 2014 (UTC)

Effectiveness of capitalizing/de-capitalizing proper nouns

dot the i is an example. Capitalizing the "i" was proposed twice, and there has been "no consensus". Also, Star Trek into Darkness became Star Trek Into Darkness because consensus wanted to capitalize "into", despite the guideline's rules discouraging it. Shall we change rules to reflect the situations? If not, shall we implement WP:IAR to disregard the rules? If not, what are other related rules? If none, what else can we do if we cannot re-propose? --George Ho (talk) 23:21, 14 August 2014 (UTC)

The titles of films, books, etc. are a special case; for example, a deliberate misspelling would be preserved in a title rather than corrected. They are certainly not good examples of the application of the general rules that the MOS promulgates. Peter coxhead (talk) 06:31, 15 August 2014 (UTC)

Your response reflects how less effective the guideline is becoming, no matter where you stand on the guideline. Can you propose re-renaming them? We had A Boy Was Born complied with this guideline because we couldn't accept "was" as an exception, but changes in WP:MOS made titles, like remember not, Lord, our offences (unless it's not a proper noun), acceptable. --George Ho (talk) 16:31, 15 August 2014 (UTC)

See MOS RfC - Animal breeds in lower case

FYI

 – Pointer to relevant discussion elsewhere

Someone's opened an RfC on using lower case for animal breeds except where they contain proper names, and this is followed by an alternative proposal based on breed standards. Both proposals would be a naming convention as well as style rule, so regulars here are liable to be interested in commenting.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  12:23, 2 October 2014 (UTC)

Television series not in English from English-speaking countries

There's a slowly rumbling renaming war going on around several articles on Spanish-language television shows produced in the United States. Spanish-language (from Spain and Mexico) shows seem to generally, though not always, only capitalise the first word; US shows (in English) capitalise all major words (as per the conventions listed here) - but the intersection is causing some confusion. Has anyone any basic solutions? Grutness...wha? 13:25, 22 August 2014 (UTC)

To summarise and paraphrase comments posted to my user talk page -

• (from AussieLegend) Damián80 and ElNiñoMonstruo have been warring over the issue of capitalisation (as well as other things). Both have received warnings - one for adding capitals, one for removing them. The warnings that ElNiñoMonstruo have received cite Wikipedia:Naming conventions (capitalization)#Capitalization of expressions borrowed from other languages as justification for not capitalising.
• (from me) It seems to me that there is no hard-and-fast rule. These expressions are not "borrowed from another language", and as such can hardly be said to fall under that classification. They are phrases within a language (these series are entirely in Spanish), but being produced in a country where capitalisation of every word is standard. As such, they fall into a grey area. Spanish-language series made in Spain and Mexico do not capitalise every word, but all other Spanish-language series I had run across from the US capitalise throughout. If full capitalisation is wrong, then many articles will need to change: Amor en Silencio, Amor Mío, Amor en Silencio, Vas o No Vas, El Cartel, El Secretario, 12 Corazones, Caso Cerrado, Suelta La Sopa, Un Nuevo Día, La Corte de Familia, La Corte del Pueblo, La Hora Lunática, Mas Vale Tarde... and about 100 others.
• (from Paulah88) To complicate matters further... In Spanish you capitalize only the first word and proper nouns in a title, e.g. Por ella soy Eva. But I checked Telemundo's web site, and they use the English conventions of capitalization, with upper case for everything except little words, e.g. El Señor de los Cielos. Why would a Spanish broadcaster use English conventions? Quien sabe?! (Who knows!) And if many of their titles originate off shore, then using a standard of "country of origin" seems to be inviting more confusion and disputes. Personal opinion here: Spanish eyes are accustomed to lower case (Amor de lechuga), but our articles are in English, so we should assume they're viewed by English eyes accustomed to upper case (Love in the Lettuce).

Grutness...wha? 01:53, 23 August 2014 (UTC)

The problem is you do not agree, all titles were previously capitalized; but then came another user changing the way the titles to lowercase. And things are always being generated problems, especially with items that have titles in Spanish. Telemundo is an American television, but many of its telenovelas are hardly produced in the United States, mostly have productions made in Mexico or Colombia. The problem is is that if allowed to capitalize all titles will then written poorly written. So just because Telemundo is an American chain, everyone will want to do the same with telenovela Televisa. For example this: "Muchacha italiana viene a casarse," to be written like this: "Muchacha Italiana Viene a Casarse" or "Muchacha Italiana Viene A Casarse". It makes no sense to put the titles on the way to anyone he pleases. Now according to the rules of the RAE, all titles should be lowercase to start only, and should be capitalized when it comes to nicknames, names, surnames, finance etc [5] The link is in Spanish; because you were the rules created for titles that should be in Spanish. Now, of course in English wikipedia, put the titles they want. I think that with respect to items of telenovelas, the titles should be lowercase, it would be more appropriate, plus many of the Spanish soap operas are.--Damián (talk) 19:57, 22 August 2014 (UTC)

So if we allow titles Telemundo telenovelas, are written in capital letters, just for being an American television network. So we should do the same with telenovela; Argentine, Mexican, Colombian, Venezuelan, etc.--Damián (talk) 20:04, 22 August 2014 (UTC)

Wrong Damián80, you are wrong at all. -ElNiñoMonstruo (talk) 05:31, 23 August 2014 (UTC)

@ElNiñoMonstruo:, Just do come here to say this?, really, if you will not bring any good to the conversation, I ask you to save you your bad comments towards me.--Damián (talk) 12:13, 23 August 2014 (UTC)

• Comment The MOS says Capitalization in foreign-language titles varies, even over time within the same language; generally, retain the style of the original. This seems clear. Peter coxhead (talk) 06:07, 23 August 2014 (UTC)
• Peter, that may be clear as far as the MOS is concerned (and I admit I hadn't seen that), but it still causes problems with both the naming and navigation. As far as naming is concerned, there are articles in lower case in the titles which refer to the programme in upper case in the text and vice versa; there are also programmes where different sources show different capitalisation. As far as navigation is concerned it makes hunting for a title hit-and-miss for the reader unless there is a very clear rule of having redirects from alternative capitalisation. Grutness...wha? 01:07, 24 August 2014 (UTC)

The text should follow the styling of the title, and, yes, there should be redirects for alternative capitalizations. This only seems to be explicitly stated for organisms (see WP:NCCAPS#Organisms). (In terms of the criteria set out at WP:AT, it's clear that consensus puts consistency low in the priority order – I find this a bit odd, but that seems to be the consensus view.) Peter coxhead (talk) 08:25, 24 August 2014 (UTC)

• Comment As a half-assed Spanish speaker, familiar with Telemundo, Univision, and other US-produced, Spanish-language programming (to an limited extent) for 20+ years, and a linguist by partial training (college minor), I have to observe that American Spanish (in the US sense, not "the Americas" sense) clearly uses American English capitalization conventions, in both television programing and other titling cases, e.g. publication titles, article headlines, etc.; and this is entirely reasonable and perhaps to be expected, since languages in close proximity to one another borrow, with the language with the highest literacy rate and largest publication output dominating written style matters (e.g. Irish, Scottish Gaelic, and Welsh language publications tend to follow British English style rules on most matters, and Breton ones those of the French language, etc., etc.

  Proposed solution: I'm agreed with Grutness that this isn't "borrowed from another language", and greed with Peter that the section he quoted is applicable. In answer to Grutness's question later, the resolution of the conflict between different sources capitalizing differently is a) do what the actual original show/publication does, and when that's indetermintae (e.g. because its' ALL-CAPPED or all-lowercase for stylistic effect), then do what the majority of the English-language sources do, because this is the English-language Wikipedia. I.e. prefer the English not Spanish edition of TV guide, etc.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  12:39, 2 October 2014 (UTC)