User:Red-tailed hawk/Sandbox/RfC closure drafts

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Initial comments from Colin M[edit]

(Preamble: these are very rough initial notes. I expect to change my mind on some of this based on further reflection and discussion with co-closers. Also, I've deliberately avoided reading the first RfC close and the discussion around the challenge closure, since I wanted to approach this with fresh eyes. I will take a look at them at some point though.)

Counting heads, I see 29 for A and 14 for B.

The supporters of B are very consistent in their reasoning. Almost all of them more or less say they support B because that's what a plain reading of MOS:JOBTITLES (which, to save some typing, I'm going to abbreviate "JT" from here on) says to do. (Exceptions are Binksternet and Tony1, who do not mention JT.) A couple editors also mentioned not capitalizing as being consistent with style guides like the Chicago Manual of Style, though this was a pretty marginal aspect of the discussion and I don't see it as bearing much on the policy considerations.

The reasons given to support A are much more varied. The main arguments I was able to identify were (in roughly descending order of frequency):

JT should be understood as applying only to running text, not infoboxes
We should continue to capitalize because it's the long-running status quo
WP:IAR (I count the recurring "it just looks weird"-type comments in this category)
JT is a bad guideline
JT does not mandate lowercase in these cases because they fall under the exception for "When a formal title for a specific entity is addressed as a title or position in and of itself...", or because the titles are not being used "generically"
analogy w/ article titles like William Cavendish, 1st Duke of Devonshire

I found that 1 was pretty effectively rebutted by opponents, who (among other counter-arguments) pointed to MOS:HEADCAPS, which advises to use sentence case in infobox headers: "Capitalize the first letter of the first word, but leave the rest lower case except for proper names and other items that would ordinarily be capitalized in running text."

I give little weight to 4. If JT is a rule that isn't worth following at all, that should be established in a separate RfC about its demotion from guideline status.

5 was not a common argument. Goszei, John Cline, and Handoto were the main proponents I saw, with Goszei giving it the clearest expression. A counterargument given by Tartan357 was that the exception should not apply because the infobox headings under discussion are "preceded by a modifier", and are similar to the example given in the guideline of: Nixon was the 37th president of the United States.

6 is an interesting angle, but it was only raised by Adumbrativus, and indirectly by SnowFire who invoked Adumbrativus in their comment.

I find the most significant arguments to be weighed in favour of B are 2 and 3.

I'm sort of at a loss on how to judge 2. Are there any examples of similar situations that have come up in the past where there's been a mismatch between established practice and P&G? In some ways, this overlaps with the IAR argument. If we grant that capitalizing these titles is in violation of JT, then this argument is essentially that editors have consistently made the judgement call to ignore this rule (in a certain context), and so we should affirm this de facto consensus to continue ignoring the rule.

Then finally there's 3, the IAR argument (aka "it looks bad"). I certainly don't think this should be dismissed out of hand. However, I do think there's some tenuousness to applying IAR to a question that affects thousands of articles (cf. the essay Wikipedia:Ignore all rules is for uncommon situations). Some of the comments in this category also come very close to "I just don't like it" territory, which is an argument that is usually considered ignorable (cf. WP:CONSENSUS#In talk pages).

My initial leaning on consensus is this: I do think there's (rough) consensus about how MOS:JOBTITLES applies to this scenario (i.e. that it advises lowercasing). But is there consensus as to whether it should be followed or ignored? That's something I'm still unsure on. Colin M (talk) 17:22, 24 September 2021 (UTC)