User:Andrewa/On Capitalisation

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This mainly as a note to myself but others may be interested...

My current view[edit]

This is partly of the nature of a disclosure, but mainly for me working it out for myself. It is subject to change without notice.

The role of the Article Naming policy, MOS, and similar guidelines[edit]

These are there to help editors produce a more coherent product by standardising the style in which articles are written. They also allow the community to provide guidance to editors on the best style to adopt, based on our collective wisdom.

They are not there to enforce ideas that have no bearing on the reader experience, or to favour some readers over others. For example, regional language variations are handled sensitively.

Capitalisation[edit]

Capitalisation of any common names of articles such as bird species, insects of certain orders, and rose cultivars, should be permitted for those which are well attested in reliable sources, in all fields. They are helpful, with no downside. These capitalisations should also be used in the running text of articles. If both the capitalised and uncapitalised names are well attested, either is acceptable unless the name is a proper name or contains proper names, in which case the normal capitalisation of these should be followed.

Standardisation[edit]

Within any article a consistent standard for capitalisation should be followed.

If we want to standardise across the project, the only way is to use binomial names for species and trinomial names for varieties and cultivars. But that cuts across WP:AT, and there's also some difference between a trinomen in zoology and an infraspecific name (botany), not sure whether that would matter.

The problem is that we use English, and English is not 100% consistent, and it's not Wikipedia's job to make it so.

The role and nature of style guides[edit]

There's an interesting essay at Wikipedia:Specialist style fallacy the nutshell of which currently [1] reads:

“ Wikipedia has its own set of guidelines for article layout and naming. Facts on a subject should be drawn from reliable sources, but how content is styled is a matter for the Wikipedia community. ”

I'd agree 100% with that.

That quote has an interesting background. I haven't yet tracked exactly who wrote this particular sentence (we could, it's all in the history), but the essay was originally written and titled by a staunch opponent of capitalisation [2] who has remained active both in updating and in quoting it since.

There's another interesting and more recent quote from Talk:MOS: [3]

“ Being ordered not to do what you've been taught is correct is a huge turnoff. ”

I've quoted this at Talk:MOS and expanded it a little: And that of course includes being ordered not to correct what you've always been taught is incorrect. [4] And it could be expanded further although that wasn't the place. It's an even bigger turnoff to be told not to do what you've always taught, in good faith, is correct. And that seems to be what we are dealing with here. Some editors (no need to name them) have invested a lot of their egos into this battle.

“ Wilson: We shouldn't have cared.
Scott: But we did. 		”
(Above quote from The Fire on the Snow)

The MOS needs to deal with exactly these issues.

Wikipedia is not just another encyclopedia. It's certainly not a dictionary. It's a new project, and developing our own MOS is not WP:OR. Original research is a problem in articles, but in the Project Namespace, it's often inevitable, and even more often a good thing.

A style guide is a set of standards for the writing and design of documents, either for general use or for a specific publication, organization or field. The implementation of a style guide provides uniformity in style and formatting within a document and across multiple documents. [5]

A style guide is particularly helpful when a document or set of documents has multiple authors. The consistency this provides improves the reader experience, and this and only this is Wikipedia's bottom line. If Wikipedia had only one author, they wouldn't need a style guide, although they'd probably consult several. But as a community-written document, Wikipedia is particularly enhanced by having a (generally) good style guide, and by people (generally) adhering to it.

And it's been good to base this style guide (the MOS) on others. Why reinvent the wheel? But Wikipedia also has some unique features that other style guides don't need to deal with. In particular:

  • Decision making by consensus.
  • The enormous and comprehensive scope and size of the project.
  • The lack of an editorial board.

So, while other style guides may help to suggest how ours should look, both by the sorts of rules they have and even the specific rules, and by themselves attesting to language use, we should not necessarily follow any of them. Which seems to be the point of the first quote above, too.

What a style guide is not[edit]

A style guide is not a test of what is correct in a language (if it were, we wouldn't allow CamelCase for example).

The case for Capitalisation[edit]

Common usage[edit]

We have several sets of evidence that capitalisation is used in English to indicate a special rather than the common use of a noun phrase in cases which fall outside of the strictest definition of a proper name:

  • Common names of birds
  • Names of dog breeds
  • Common names of species in the orders Odonata (dragonflies etc) and Lepidoptera (butterflies and moths)
  • Names of rose cultivars such as Sun Flare (rose)
  • Common names of UK plants

The first two are well attested in reliable sources. I have not yet found examples of the insect common names... the Wikipedia articles seem instead to be titled with the binomial names. The rose example comes from my experience in the field, but this is complicated by the fact that the most of the more notable varieties (the ones with Wikipedia articles) either have a single word name so are capitalised by default, or are named after people, so are capitalised for that reason.

The plants claim comes from this edit which is an appeal for the use of binomial names instead of common names, but does as an aside make that observation.

There are other examples in Wikipedia:

These also follow other style guides and common practice. See also User:SMcCandlish/Capitalization_of_organism_names#Capitalization_of_breeds_and_cultivars.

Others are controversial:

Reader experience[edit]

Reader experience is our bottom line.

Use of capitals for names of things that might otherwise be misinterpretted, for example Grey Wolf when referring to the species rather than just any wolf that happens to be grey in colour, is harmless, and can prevent misunderstanding.

Consistency[edit]

So, there are good reasons to capitalise these few subject areas.

And that naturally suggests, should we capitalise other cases where there is a special usage of a noun phrase? There seems no reason why not. There is no downside to doing it more generally, and if we're going to do it in the cases of some breeds and cultivars, then we should allow editors to use such capitalisation elsewhere if it helps clarify the meaning.

That simply seems to be good style! Perhaps it would be wrong to try to enforce it, but we already allow some freedom, in particular concerning varieties of English, and this makes for a better encyclopedia.

The case against capitalisation, with replies[edit]

Grammar[edit]

Capitalisation of any but proper nouns and proper names is claimed to be an error of grammar. This seems to be the most common motivation.

Reply[edit]

An example of hypercorrection. In English, capitalisation is a marker of slightly but significantly broader scope than just proper nouns and proper names. Bird species and dog breed names are cases in point.

It should also be noted that while the proponents of the grammar argument often (not always) call these cases proper nouns, in the case of article titles (the most common source of dispute) the use of capitalisation for proper nouns is not the topic at all. The issue only arises in the case of multi-word article titles, or noun phrases. If the article title is a single noun, it is capitalised by default; If not, then it is a proper name, but not strictly speaking a proper noun.

Consistency[edit]

Guidelines[edit]

Existing guidelines[edit]

MOS:CAPS currently [6] reads in part words and phrases that are consistently capitalized in sources are treated as proper names and capitalized in Wikipedia. (My emphasis.)

On the other hand, Wikipedia:Naming conventions (capitalization) currently [7] reads in part Do not capitalize the second or subsequent words in an article title, unless the title is a proper noun. 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.

Obviously the naming convention is referring to proper names not proper nouns, but that's just a quibble, and there are other quibbles... it later states ...these cases are typically examples of buzzwords, which by capitalization are (improperly) given featured status. Such unattributed judgements as (improperly) don't belong in the naming conventions.

But the most interesting thing is that the second of these guidelines... which have both had recent edit activity... is a lot stricter than the first. They should be consistent, surely?

History[edit]

Some relevant discussions, decisions and changes.

ARBCOM[edit]

MOS[edit]

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