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Talk:St. Peter's flood

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Title name issues

[edit]

I have been cruising around articles about floods and I see that this article not only capitalizes "flood" but it is actually an article about two floods so possibly should be titled St. Peter's floods or something to that effect.

There has been an on-going controversy on the capitalization of words in a title that normally are not capitalized. With few exceptions the word flood is not capitalized throughout Wikipedia as evidenced at [[Category:Floods]] and [[Category:Floods in the United States]] among others. [[Category:Floods in Canada]] list 19 like named titles (flood used in the title not as a first word or proper noun) and of these 6 capitalize "flood".
  • Wikipedia policy:
Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Titles#Capitalization states, "However, for names of Wikipedia articles and of section headings in articles and pages, generally only the first word and all proper names are capitalized in titles.". Wikipedia:Article titles#Article title format states, "Use lowercase, except for proper names". This supposedly narrows the criteria to determining if a word is part of such a "proper noun" or named as such as provided by reliable sources as the common name. the word "flood", in this instance, is clearly not part of a proper noun.
I am always a proponent of using the common name when possible (exceptions for avoiding ambiguity) otherwise policy and title consistency should be followed. Otr500 (talk) 13:24, 1 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]