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Unusual RM case

FYI
 – Pointer to relevant discussion elsewhere.

Please see Talk:The Players Championship#Requested move 23 November 2017. At issue is whether a capitalized "The" should be retained in the title and in running prose when one is favored by many (perhaps a majority) of specialized (in this case golf) sources, but not reflected across reliable sources more generally. Various pro and con arguments are presented including traditionalism versus WP:THE, disambiguation, consistency, whether special rules for publication titles and band names (subject to distinct guidelines) can be extrapolated to other topics, what is and isn't a "proper name", and most of the other stuff we come to expect of one of the louder rows at WP:RM. The outcome of this RM will probably affect two other golf event articles with similar "The" names.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ<  08:41, 26 November 2017 (UTC)

The proper and common name of The Players Championship is The Players Championship. One of the "two other golf event articles" it "will probably affect" is The Open Championship, the most historic and iconic name in golf! If Wikipedia comes to the point where it changes the name of The Open Championship we may just as well roll up the welcome mat and lock the door, for we will no longer be an encyclopedia. Randy Kryn (talk) 11:32, 26 November 2017 (UTC)
But the Open Championship is more commonly discussed with lowercase "the" (see books). Doesn't that mean they don't consider "The" to be an essential part of the name? What is the basis for the funny exception you have re-inserted? Dicklyon (talk) 05:52, 27 November 2017 (UTC)

Meta-discussion

When someone posts a {{FYI|pointer to relevant discussion elsewhere}} that means "please discuss it at that location". It is not an invitation to WP:DISCUSSFORK. And re-iterating the same argument here that's already been rebutted with actual sources over there isn't constructive. Please see WP:IDHT.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ<  12:34, 26 November 2017 (UTC)
Agreed, except when the pointer is making the case for one-side or the other by the use of such charged language as "most of the other stuff we come to expect of one of the louder rows at WP:RM". With this language I would think that a discussion has also been opened up here. And your "actual sources" is one guy on a website paraphrasing the accepted name (although there exist other sources from websites which paraphrase the name). This nitpicking of some sources to change a common familiar name is why, in my opinion, this "consistency" guideline is so absurd and harmful to the encyclopedia. Randy Kryn (talk) 12:53, 26 November 2017 (UTC)
You're inventing an inference that is not implied. I've said nothing whatsoever pro or con either/any outcome, only indicated that the debate is heated and multi-pronged, which is an accurate assessment. This is also among the proper venues for notice, as it's full of "to capitalize or not to capitalize" regulars, who are not topically tied to the subject (in the aggregate – I'm sure a few golf fans/players are among the regulars). PS: No, the actual sources consists of innumeral news sources using no "the" at all, much less a "The"-capitalized one in mid-sentence (though that style is also attested, especially in golf-specific publications). I have no idea what "one guy on a website" you are referring to.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ<  03:36, 27 November 2017 (UTC)
On the other matters: The consistency guideline you don't like was introduced by fans of WP:COMMONNAME in the mid-2010s, to impose its "follow the sources" nature on the MoS material that had a strong effect on article titles; this was after quite a bit of negotiation. What was there before was stricter rules that amounted to simply "never capitalize this or that", without any room for exceptions not specifically enumerated. I.e., you're complaining about a rule that is now much more flexible and basically amounts to agreement with the WP:CCPOL, when before there was "obey our house style, period".

I don't see how you can be satisfied, other than with "don't even follow majority source usage, just use whatever style you like best [probably based on a combination of specialist sources and decades-old sources] and fight to keep it that way if you are convinced it is WP:RIGHT and that changing it would be a WP:GREATWRONG." That you may be bringing a perspective tinged with this is strongly evidenced by wording like "so absurd and harmful to the encyclopedia" and (at my talk page) "the changing of what I see as iconic names ... I truly believe doing that is not good for the overall project", and similar "right and good versus wrong and harmful" thinking (rather than "used by the majority of RS independent of the subject, vs. less used") arguments you brought in the MOS:JR debates. No offense intended; it's just hard to come to a conclusion other than that this is an WP:NOT#ADVOCACY matter, about particular style nit-picks for which you have a deep sense of traditionalism that disregards current publishing practices. From another perspective, it looks like you're misinterpreting a descriptive rule as prescriptive, because you're strongly prescribing something yourself and it doesn't match the descriptive results.
 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ<  03:58, 27 November 2017 (UTC)

Yes, I certainly perceive that a guideline demanding consistently sourced material, not even close to a majority, just that if some sources lower-case then the Wikipedia title gets lowercased/lessened, as harming the encyclopedia. Even if the title is the real name of an event, such as The Players Championship, or The Open Championship - undoubtedly one of if not the most iconic name in sports which you publicly say is next on the list, if some sources paraphrase a name, then, as written, on Wikipedia the paraphrasing prevails. If The Players Championship is changed you are set to have an RM on The Open Championship, and you likely have paraphrased examples to make your case. That's the crux of the matter, that you and others would even contemplate such a thing. And if a luck-of-the-draw closer accepts the absolute-consistency wording, and one of the most iconic names in sports is altered here, of course it would further harm the public perception of Wikipedia - the encyclopedia that anyone can edit and anyone can take a two-iron and blast an iconic name into the next fairway and call it right-down-the-middle. Encyclopedias are expected to use familiar and common names, names which the public understands as being the correct name. Some of Wikipedia's guidelines, as written or perceived by some nominators and some closers, do the opposite. When they are used to change names such as The Open Championship, as you would like to do, the use of guideline language should be concerning and seen as an institutional problem. Randy Kryn (talk) 11:57, 27 November 2017 (UTC)

Chicken and egg

These edits concern me... some of them may support Talk:The Players Championship#Requested move 23 November 2017 which the editor proposed. Not cricket if so, surely. Andrewa (talk) 19:35, 8 December 2017 (UTC)

RfC on capital letters, etc., in Russian train station article titles

FYI
 – Pointer to relevant discussion elsewhere.

Please see Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)#RfC: Russian railway line article titles.
 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ<  04:31, 9 December 2017 (UTC)

"Deputy Mayor of X" but "a deputy mayor"

Could someone please check Mayor of New York#Deputy mayors: It looks to me like there should be more caps in this section. However, I'm not sufficiently confident to make those changes, especially since there are several. DavidMCEddy (talk) 02:59, 9 December 2017 (UTC)

My feeling on this is "Fuleihan is first deputy mayor" but "Deputy Mayor Fuleihan". The article is now the former. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 20:16, 20 December 2017 (UTC)

Academic titles

Should the academic titles like "assistant professor" and "associate professor" be written with capital letters? Ali Pirhayati (talk) 11:34, 16 December 2017 (UTC)

@Pirhayati: Generally no in Wikipedia, as explained at MOS:JOBTITLES. If used before a name as part of the name, it would be "Professor Smith said ..." or "Assistant Professor Smith said ...", but "Smith, an assistant professor at Jones University, said ...". Many academics and some university style guides capitalize these words and others because they are so important in their context (see WP:SPECIALSTYLE), but Wikipedia doesn't. Thank you.  SchreiberBike | ⌨  18:10, 16 December 2017 (UTC)
  • Perhaps we should. there is a difference between the generic concept of an assistant professor--a rank tha tat various countries at various times has been implemented in various job titles, and the specific rank of Assistant Professor in the US system of higher education (and its models). DGG ( talk ) 23:20, 6 January 2018 (UTC)
    Better to use prose to illustrate that. Capitalization as disambiguation has been fairly rejected. Primergrey (talk) 01:54, 7 January 2018 (UTC)

I'm still confused on difference between sc and sc2 templates

Is there a preference for lexical sets to be using {{sc}}, as in GOAT, or {{sc2}}, as in GOAT. I'm still a bit confused when do use one vs the other, but it seems that there has been a recent push to use the latter. Does one use the latter so the capitalization is preserved when copy/pasting? Hope this is the right place to ask. Umimmak (talk) 00:24, 22 December 2017 (UTC)

@Umimmak: Yep, this is the place, to the extent anyone's worked it out. I have no idea why so many of these templates were created, but they're deployed all over the place. Would be nice to merge them and just do what they do with parameters. Anyway, please see the revised (a month or so ago) MOS:SMALLCAPS section and its footnotes. It explains what each one does with examples.

The short version that when smallcapping an acronym, which we usually don't do but there seems to be consensus to do it with post-nominal letters, you want it to copy-paste as, e.g. "OBE" not "obe", so use {{sc2|OBE}}, which presents it in a reasonable size and has that copy-paste effect: OBE. When the smallcaps are a stylistic variant applied to regular text, you want it to copy-paste as normal text, e.g. "Kentucky Dawn" not "KENTUCKY DAWN", and for case to be distinguishable in the rendered version, so the template to use is {{sc1|Kentucky Dawn}} → Kentucky Dawn. The rest of the cases are specialized usage, like quite small caps that copy-paste as lower-case no matter what's put in – {{sc|adj}} and {{sc|ADJ}} render and copy paste the same, as "adj": ADJ, ADJ.Tht's the one historically used for grammatical morpheme abbreviations in interlinear glosses.

The closest thing to a mnemonic I've worked out for it is "Start small with sc1 for lower (or mixed) case, go up to sc2 for upper case, and cut it off to sc if you want stunted letters and case decapitated permanently." I'm tempted to forget the third part on purpose, because the main use for that was those morpheme abbreviations, but now there's a custom template for this, {{gcl}}. This stuff doesn't cover {{LORD}}, but that one's obvious. For Unicode codepoint names, just use the {{unichar}} (or sc2 if you really need the name on its own; those are conventionally given in upper case when smallcaps isn't available, so they should copy-paste that way; they're basically analogous to ISO unit symbols like GHz and mA, or language codes like en-AU, so they're just used the way they are even if they're ugly). There's also {{tdes}} for botanical trade designations. The ultimate solution is probably identifying every accepted use of SC style and giving it its own template so no one has to remember sc1, sc2, sc differences.
 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ<  23:22, 9 January 2018 (UTC)

Okay, well I guess from this conversation that the editor who made the changes to the formatting of lexical set names is choosing sc2 so that it remains uppercase when copied? That makes sense, thanks. Umimmak (talk) 23:28, 9 January 2018 (UTC)

Merge in MOS:PN

There is a clear consensus for this proposal to merge Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Proper names into MOS:CAPS#Proper names. At WP:ANRFC, SMcCandlish (talk · contribs) wrote about the merge:

It's on my to-do list. Virtually on one else does MoS merges these days (probably because they don't have the asbestos armor that I do). I dealt with all the other out-standing MOS:BIO merges first, and have let that settle out over the last month. The MOS:PN one is a split-and-merge; it'll be a more complicated section-by-section job, since parts of it are about human names, others about titles of works, other about geography, etc.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  10:47, 23 July 2018 (UTC)

Cunard (talk) 22:42, 30 September 2018 (UTC)

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

It is further proposed that the redundant, poorly maintained, and rarely cited page WP:Manual of Style/Proper names be merged into MOS:CAPS#Proper names (which doesn't even mention the existence of the disused subpage). Doing this will centralize the relevant advice, and aid both clarity for the reader of MoS (MOSCAPS makes frequent reference to proper names) and ability of MoS editors to maintain and clarify the material as needed.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  18:28, 26 September 2017 (UTC)

  • Strong Oppose for now, unless the merge clearly includes the relevant sentences from the proper name guideline when talking about capitalization: "Such names are frequently a source of conflict between editors from different backgrounds, especially in cases where different cultures, using different names, 'claim' someone or something as their own. Wikipedia does not seek to judge such rival claims, but as a general rule uses the name which is likely to be most familiar to readers of English. Alternative names are often given in parentheses for greater clarity and fuller information" with the key line "Wikipedia does not seek to judge such rival claims, but as a general rule uses the name which is likely to be most familiar to readers of English." 'Most familiar' directly clashes with that 'consistency' guideline that says, more or less, that unless something is sourced capitalized almost 100% of the time some editor can point to that guideline and the title can be lower-cased, even if the upper-case is the most familiar name. The most common-sense way of naming something is 'most familiar', and it's nice to see it formalized in a relevant guideline somewhere. Could have used this in the comma wars if I knew about it, but that one is set-in-stone and the Jr.'s commas gone and remembered fondly. Randy Kryn (talk) 15:01, 27 September 2017 (UTC)
Relevant but long discussion about who will do the merge if this is merged, relevant sentences to merge, why naming conventions are out-of-scope for MoS (it's WP:AT material), and how merging works:
  • "Most familiar" is a title selection guideline, not a styling guideline. Many terms are familiar to people by virtue of their appearance in titles, headings, signs, etc., where caps are common, yet are commonly lowercased in running text, which is the indication that sources aren't treating them as proper names. Similarly, when comma styling differs, or changes over time, people may be familiar with different versions. If you were a reader of magazines in the 60s, you'd be very familiar with "Martin Luther King Jr." without a comma; letting sources vote on which names we keep commas in was never a good or accepted idea. Dicklyon (talk) 16:50, 27 September 2017 (UTC)
    Yeah, that's a WP:POVFORK, of someone trying to import WP:AT material into WP:MOS where it doesn't belong. MOS's own "consistent in reliable sources" wording was the product of long compromise (and appears in the main MOS, too, which trumps all MoS subpages, including MOSPN one, so no you couldn't have used it to wikilawyer, Randy). There's something to be said for retaining a note that proper names are often a source of conflict to avoid, but it has nothing at all to do with trying to bend WP:COMMONNAME (which is about the choice between, e.g., David Johansen versus Buster Poindexter) to seem as if applicable to style trivia. There's a decade+ consensus that is not the case.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  07:36, 28 September 2017 (UTC)
So you're not really suggesting a merge, because the core sentence of the guideline which would be merged is Wikipedia does not seek to judge such rival claims, but as a general rule uses the name which is likely to be most familiar to readers of English. This is not redundant as it partially contradicts the 'consistency' guideline language, which could not have arrived from true consensus or compromise because it gives no ground to commonsense. The sentence above does, and it allows room for some capitalization if an upper-case name is more familiar to readers of English than a lower-case name, even if it is not consistently applied. If this is really a merge proposal you'd agree that the core language from the page would be kept in a merge, and that would be the "most familiar" phrasing. I don't think that's asking for too much when a merge is suggested, that the core of the merged page is kept when the merge is completed. Randy Kryn (talk) 12:28, 28 September 2017 (UTC)
Randy, the "familiar" bit there is very clearly in the context of choosing between proper names; that's well covered already in WP:AT, and a merge should be careful to not let it appear to be a styling issue. If you go back to where Kotniski inserted that language in 2009, he replaced a sentence that tried to distinguish between the styling and name choice issues that are mixed on this page: "Therefore, in addition to setting certain rules and standards, this style page is meant to aid the process of finding compromise when a name conflict arises." Such changes have received little attention, as evidenced by the very low edit rate over the years (about one edit per month, which is way low for a style guideline page). So it's not surprising that it's out of sync with mainstream style guidelines, at least in how it conflates naming and style issues. Dicklyon (talk) 18:20, 28 September 2017 (UTC)
Yep, one of the problems we had for a long time was "PoV-forking" of the same underlying guidance between WP:AT and the various naming conventions versus the overlapping material in MoS pages. That's been almost entirely cleaned up down to the subtopical level (e.g. WP:NCCAPS and MOS:CAPS, and WP:NCFAUNA + WP:NCFLORA and MOS:LIFE). We just missed a spot. The only other such conflict I'm aware of is between WP:NCCOMICS and MOS:COMICS (the latter of which similarly contains some NC material it shouldn't have in it); that one has been flagged for cleanup already.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  23:27, 28 September 2017 (UTC)

PS: The "Wikipedia does not seek to judge such rival claims" wording is correct, but the "as a general rule uses the name which ..." stuff is out-of-scope for MoS. That's a WP:AT matter. MoS, where it intersects with names, is about stylization of them, and the consistent rule across WP:MOS, MOS:CAPS, MOS:TM, MOS:TITLES, etc., is to not apply stylization except when it's used with remarkable consistency in reliable sources. This is what keeps our articles readable, and is why Pink (singer) doesn't read "P!NK's third album, TRy THis ..."; but also why Deadmau5 doesn't use "Deadmaus", a spelling barely used in sources even when you search for it specifically [1]  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  23:36, 28 September 2017 (UTC)

Of course those styling examples aren't included ('Pink' is the most familiar name for 'P!nk' in English, and whatever that 'Try This' styling is the album would still be at 'Try This' as its most familiar name) The 'most familiar' terminology is for titles, and in this guideline as well as the comics guideline you mentioned (the comics guideline reads "Generally, article naming should indicate what the greatest number of English speakers would most easily recognize, with a reasonable minimum of ambiguity,") it gives an established alternate point-of-view to the absolute consistency language that has been the source of much objection. So, concerning this possible merge, who gets to decide on what to merge? The language I point to is a major point of the guideline, and any merger should of course include the defining core of the page which, as Dicklyon has mentioned, has been in place since 2009. Randy Kryn (talk) 13:31, 29 September 2017 (UTC)
Re: "Of course those styling examples aren't" and "the album would still be at" – Yes, specifically because we have rules against mimicking marketing stylization. I think you've simply not been here long enough to have observed the number of times we've had to deal with this stuff, especially when it comes to pop culture topics. I'm not going to argue circularly with you any further.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ<  21:24, 30 September 2017 (UTC)
You brought up the 'P!nk' example, and I only answered that it's not the most familiar name in English. My main concern is capitalization, not minor style points. You have yet to answer my questions of who gets to merge the pages. Randy Kryn (talk) 12:02, 1 October 2017 (UTC)
The question does not compute on a wiki.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ<  22:41, 1 October 2017 (UTC)
Uh, okay? WP:MERGE. Randy Kryn (talk) 22:44, 1 October 2017 (UTC)
And? I think there's just a failure to communicate here. There isn't a contest for "who gets to merge the pages". It's just work to do that someone will step up to do (unless there's a consensus against the idea). If they do a crappy job, others will fix it. The wiki way, as usual. One can actually request a third party do the merge, in a section at WP:PM, but it seems rarely used other than for settling long-running content flamewars, or to deal with technically difficult stuff that someone is having trouble implementing. That's actually probably a bad idea in this case, since a PM respondent isn't likely to have the in situ experience to detect wording conflicts across various MoS pages, and AT vs. MOS scope problems. Anyway, this discussion has already been listed at PM, in the section for announcing discussions for people to comment on.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ<  01:12, 4 October 2017 (UTC)
  • Strong support – Apparently I used to know of WP:PN, as I editted it a few times in 2011 and 2012, but it had escaped my memory recently. It's an irrelevant out-of-sync outlier that needs to be brought into the mainstream in a compatible way. Thanks for working on such things, S. Dicklyon (talk) 18:26, 28 September 2017 (UTC)
    • Another is the long-overdue merge-and-cleanup of advice on titles of works; I catalogued all the redundant sections, and we're using a template to identify where they all are but at some point actually need to do the cleanup. It's just going to be headache-inducing.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  23:27, 28 September 2017 (UTC)
  • I shall support this, and remind whoever has the responsibility of effecting it to ensure the appropriate shortcuts are transferred ... I am sure you will have considered this already, though.
    –Sb2001 talk page 22:42, 4 October 2017 (UTC)
    Yep, that's important.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ<  10:43, 4 January 2018 (UTC)
  • Will re-ping WP:VPPOL for more input.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ<  10:14, 3 December 2017 (UTC)
  • Support in concept... however I share the concern that we might lose some important bits of language in the merger. Let's not rush into things. The old language needs to be discussed, and consensus reached on the new language, before the merger takes place. Blueboar (talk) 19:18, 3 December 2017 (UTC)
  • Support in concept – it seems workable. I don't understand Randy's objection. The language "as a general rule uses the name which is likely to be most familiar to readers of English" is enshrined in the general naming WP:CRITERIA for recognizability already. Is he thinking that this language will help him argue for caps on things he likes that way even though sources mostly don't, like civil rights movement and Homestead strike? Hard to see how this is going to affect the stuff he argues against MOS:CAPS about. Dicklyon (talk) 04:42, 4 December 2017 (UTC)
  • Support. When I came across the "Stong oppose" at the top, I though: "That has to be Randy Kryn". Why did I think that, Randy? Tony (talk) 06:07, 5 December 2017 (UTC)
  • Thanks for the compliment, appreciated. I don't know why you thought it, but if it has anything to do with my interest in saving the long-time language which exists in the page suggested for merging, the common sense language which asks Wikipedians to try to use names most familiar to readers, thanks again. Randy Kryn (talk) 00:04, 15 December 2017 (UTC)
The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Black

I can't find a guideline indicating a preference for "... to encourage black and Latina young women to pursue careers ..." or "... to encourage Black and Latina young women to pursue careers ...". (This is from Powtawche Valerino.) Is there one? Largoplazo (talk) 14:50, 14 January 2018 (UTC)

Most RS give it in lower-case most of the time, and most of our articles do as well (same with "white", "people of color", etc.). This has been discussed many times before [2] apparently without consensus. My own feel on it, and what I do in off-WP writing, is use the lower-case version except in a context when doing so is awkward or confusing. The lack of symmetry in "black and Latina" is a good example. It may also be important in the context that "Black" in that particular construction is a shorthand for "African-American" specifically, not "people of African descent around the whole world". It's a specific ethnic reference like Coloured is in South Africa, not a general blanket classifier (nor is this news; Richard Pryor worked that distinction into his stand-up comedy routine as early as the 1980s). This is just my take; given that there's no rule about it, but a general rule against unnecessary capitalization, I would think that capitalizing it is always going to come down to a contextual analysis at the article in question. In this specific case my opinion is for "Black", or to rewrite the entire thing as "to encourage young women of color to pursue careers ...". It might even be more accurate – does the program exclude Asian Americans, Native Americans, etc.?  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ<  17:45, 16 January 2018 (UTC)

I just checked, and the sponsoring organization's site says nothing about ethnicity or race at all [3]. Mission statement: "The PowHERful Foundation gets young women to, and through, college. We provide financial assistance, mentorship, and wraparound services to help our scholars achieve their highest potentials. We reach an even broader audience through our Summit series, where we bring day-long conferences to major cities across the country for young women." So, the proper wording in our article should surely be "to encourage young women to pursue careers".  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ<  17:49, 16 January 2018 (UTC)

For Valerino, sharing her knowledge with the next generation of students is natural. She knows that in telling her story, she’s providing valuable exposure to a profession many women and minorities aren’t usually encouraged to pursue. She has worked with Soledad O’Brien to encourage Black and Latina females to pursue careers in STEM at the PoweHERful summit. Umimmak (talk) 20:55, 16 January 2018 (UTC)
The wording in that article in particular is under further discussion at Talk:Powtawche Valerino.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ<  19:05, 18 January 2018 (UTC)

U.S. Government vs. U.S. government, Federal Government of the United States vs. federal government of the United States

Capitalization of "federal" and "government" seems to be all over the place for these terms and their variants (U.S. federal government, United States government, and the like). These don't appear to be proper names; the name of the republic is "United States of America", and its government is simply the government of the United States of America, or the federal government. I think the MoS should provide some guidance for this. Maybe we could get a federal grant (not a Federal grant) to finance the construction of a bot to fix all these. ;-) Chris the speller yack 17:28, 27 January 2018 (UTC)

  • My opinion: capitalize “Government” when discussing a specific nation’s government. Lower case “government” when generic. So: “While many governments around the world do X, the US Government, and the Government of France do Y.” Blueboar (talk) 18:50, 27 January 2018 (UTC)
I think when referring to the United States, it's always lower case for federal or government, but other countries have different conventions. I'm not sure if it's an EngVar thing or if I might even write "Government of India" in a US English article, since that's the standard in India.  SchreiberBike | ⌨  18:59, 31 January 2018 (UTC)

RfC: Capitalisation of traditional game/sports terminology

Closing RFC, the consensus is that no, the names of such games and sports, and their associated terminology, should not be capitalized. Fish+Karate 13:11, 6 February 2018 (UTC)

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Should names of traditional games and sports, and of game-play items and other terminology associated with them, be capitalized?
 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ<  09:12, 1 January 2018 (UTC)

Comments on game/sport capitals

  • No, for reasons detailed in the "Extended discussion" section. Summary: They are not proper names (it's "poker", "triathlon", "pool cue", not "Poker", "Triathlon", "Pool Cue"), and sources do not consistently capitalize them. RfC opened because a mostly-ignored RM's failure to come to consensus led directly to pro-capitals editwarring almost immediately, and that's not okay. We should have a sentence or two about this in MOS:CAPS, because this not the first or last time that over-capitalization in relation to sports and games has been and will be an issue.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ<  09:12, 1 January 2018 (UTC)
  • Strong support of common and familiar names for traditional games. SMcCandlish wanted to lower-case all of the traditional chess moves (i.e. King's Gambit to king's gambit. Seriously?). He also wanted to change the name of The Open Championship, probably the most iconic name in sports. SMc, you are wonderful at working on and polishing policy, but in the naming of names, you have, as I've explained on your talk page, a blind-spot to common names and most familiar names. Randy Kryn (talk) 01:16, 2 January 2018 (UTC)
    I've never in my life encountered the argument that we should capitalize something because it's familiar or common. This is certainly not found in any style guide, much less ours. And this has nothing to do with chess openings; see #Chess openings below. Whether WP:THE applies to a particular article has nothing to do with MOS:CAPS, and our guidelines apply regardless who seeks to apply or evade them. Please stop thrashing, and ad hominem personalizing, in style discussions you are not correctly following. I'll take this up at your talk page.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ<  07:25, 2 January 2018 (UTC)
    Please note that just before SmCCandlish wrote the above he added a section to the bottom addressing my concern about changing the names of chess moves (then pointing to it as if it was there all along, asking me not to thrash something, then running off to my talk page to put up a you're-a-bad-editor lecture). Would have been a more accurate and better good-faith edit to kindly thank me for pointing out the chess move concern and for inspiring him to clarify it. Randy Kryn (talk) 21:50, 2 January 2018 (UTC)
    I pointed to it because it was added in the discussion section (where it belongs) and I didn't want to repeat it all here. You didn't inspire me to clarify it, Ihardlythinkso did (though it actually needed no clarification). And the fact that ArbCom annoyingly requires delivery of {{Ds/alert}} templates when editors cross WP:ASPERSIONS lines on pages covered by WP:AC/DS has nothing to do with any reasoning I've presented, the timing of anything, or whether someone's a good editor. It's just bureaucracy I didn't invent, and actually oppose, in an still-ongoing ARCA.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ<  10:42, 4 January 2018 (UTC)
  • No, reserve caps for proper names like in every other part of en.w. Not sure why Randy K wants to cap names of "traditional games" (dominoes, chess, and checkers?) when they are not proper names. Dicklyon (talk) 01:24, 2 January 2018 (UTC)
The problem is that aficionados think these words ARE proper names (since THEY use them as such)... so it might help to explain in more detail why they are not. Blueboar (talk) 01:42, 2 January 2018 (UTC)
Agreed. I think SMcCandlish has provided a detailed explanation. I was mostly responding to the Randy who (if I understand him) argues to cap them even without claiming they are proper names. We usually look to sources, and treat as proper names those terms that are consistently capped in sources; terms that are mixed we lowercase; there is no definitive numerical criterion distinguishing these realms, but certainly for nine men's morris (one of the discussions that prompted this) the sources support lowercase on all the game name variants; books such as this one that use it both ways make it clear that caps are often for titles and headings even when use in sentences is lowercase, indicating not a proper name. And books like this one make it clear that editors who work to decide which ones to cap don't cap this one, even when they do cap Go. Dicklyon (talk) 05:11, 2 January 2018 (UTC)
  • You misunderstand and are mischaracterizing my position. Of course I don't want to capitalize chess, or dominoes, or such. But the problem here is that McClandish worded this question so open-ended that he may plan to use it as a run-around to lower-case such names as King's Gambit (he wants to lower-case all chess moves) (oh, I see he took that off-the-table after I pointed out that this RfC could have affected them, I'll let my comments here stand in order to assure that things like that are truly left alone), and several others (he "lost" at The Player's Championship which was his stated stepping-stone to change one of the most iconic names in sports, The Open Championship). So editors, please read the wording of this "RfC" carefully, see that it is open-ended, and that red-herrings such as me wanting to capitalize 'chess' or 'dominoes' may be laid in the path of me also pointing out that lower-casing some of the types of things he wants to lower-case actually harms the encyclopedia and its public credibility. Randy Kryn (talk) 11:18, 2 January 2018 (UTC)
  • We've already been over chess openings; there's a whole section on that below. As for the rest of this, the entire point is that there is no difference at all between "chess, or dominoes, or such", and nine men's morris and morabara; they're all folk tabletop games, not trademarks, not anything else. There's nothing to mischaracterize. The Player's Championship RM has nothing of any kind to do with anything under discussion here (and this perpetual dwelling on WP:WIN language is not constructive); that was a WP:THE policy case (whether it it's capitalized or not was never in question, since it's a trademark). What this looks like is "Someone wants to rename a game article? Fight! Fight! Fight!"  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ<  22:14, 9 January 2018 (UTC)
  • Support lowercase for un-trademarked games. If there are any pro-caps arguments that go beyond "I don't like it", I'm keen to hear them. If any exceptional cases exist, than an overwhelming majority of sources will bear that out. Primergrey (talk) 06:35, 2 January 2018 (UTC)
  • No, per Primergrey. We need to avoid WP:SSFs as much as possible. James (talk/contribs) 15:24, 2 January 2018 (UTC)
  • No, unless a substantial majority of reliable sources capitalize the term, we should not either. Seraphimblade Talk to me 02:44, 6 January 2018 (UTC)
  • Lower case per the first paragraph of the associated project page.  SchreiberBike | ⌨  03:04, 6 January 2018 (UTC)
    I also found the associated wikiproject page, the short essay at Wikipedia:WikiProject Games/Article advice; it's entirely silent on the matter. As a long-term games and sports editor (it's my primary mainspace focus), I know from experience that the vast majority of editors in this topic area know that names of non-commercial games (in either sense) and equipment are not capitalized. This is directly provable simply by observing that almost none of them are capitalized – we know who wrote the articles, and it wasn't botanists or people specializing in opera singer bios. When they are capitalized it's almost always either a) an obscure stub with only one major author who is not a regular editor, or b) it's a game from part of the world where English is not the dominant language and was primarily written up here by a non-native English speaker (e.g. the rampant over-capping that was in Carrom and related articles, and which creeps back in from time to time).  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ<  13:22, 6 January 2018 (UTC)
  • No caps, similar to with academic subjects. –Sb2001 22:53, 8 January 2018 (UTC)

Extended discussion of game/sport capitals

Background, and a case for "no": A "local consensus" at a handful of game-related articles has been imposing capitalization of the names of, and terms related to, traditional games (folk games and sports, not trademarked commercial ones).

Some examples:

  • Nine Men's Morris, Twelve Men's Morris, and some related games are at capitalized titles, and using capital letters in the text in (a recent RM drew almost no commentary and closed with no consensus). A copy-paste from the lead of the current version one: "The game is also known as Nine Man Morris, Mill, Mills, The Mill Game, Merels, Merrills, Merelles, Marelles, Morelles and Ninepenny Marl in English. The game has also been called Cowboy Checkers ..." The "morris" is this is not the name Morris/Maurice, nor (as in Morris dancing) an alternative spelling of Moorish, but is just a corruption of Latin merellus, 'gamepiece'. The fact that it looks like the name Morris is pure coincidence, and RS do not generally treat it as a proper name [4], [5], [6], [7], [8], [9], [10], and many others. Lower case is used even in sources that go back a century (when capitalization was much more common for such things) [11]. Shakespeare used lower case, in an era when capitalization for signification was even more common [12]. Some capitalization can be found in things that aren't guidebooks (which, as a class, tend to capitalize everything they have an entry about – this was a central point in the "capitalization of common names of species" RfC, which concluded for lowercase), e.g. [13]. It is pretty common. But works of all sorts use lowercase. No serious claim can be made that RS are consistently using upper case, even within a particular genre or field of writing. Not even game guidebooks, the most likely to capitalize [14]. Tellingly, even a German source gives it in lower-case (but with the "German-hyphen"), despite German being prone to capitalizing nouns and noun phrases [15].
  • Morabaraba was capitalizing pretty much every game-related word, including non-English terms in languages that don't even use capitalization that way. My MOS:CAPS cleanup of this was reverted [16] with a "local consensus" claim, yet there is no such consensus in evidence, and it would have to be very strong, i.e. based on overwhelming consistency of capitalization in sources. Any skim of games-related sources shows widely mixed usage. Guidebooks capitalize often (see WP:NOT#GUIDE), nor do numerous other sources (just from the first page of Google Books results: [17], [18], [19], [20]. Clearly, the RS do not consistently treat this as a proper name, regardless of whether they are journalism, fiction, academic works, or guidebooks. Some cases of capitalization of this term are actually a different use, a cultural one.
  • Articles on various other obscure sports and games were also capitalizing when initially written, but have been lower-cased since then (e.g. Carrom, which was full of "Carrom", "Karrom", "Queen", "Striker", "Point Carrom", etc. [21]. Same story at Jeu provençal, which had "Boule", "Boules", "Bocce", "Volo", "Landing", "Pétanque", etc. [22]. There has been no controversy about them being lower-cased properly, for years (and many already were, of course), until it reached nine men's morris and the related game morabaraba (similar in many ways to carrom, though a strategy not physical-skill game). Virtually all of our articles on folk games and traditional sports are lowercase for both game name and terms like equipment names.

On the other hand, about 95% of our material on traditional sports and games is in lower-case (we do not play, or write about, Football on a Football Pitch or Football Field, nor Chess on a Chess Board). Compare the above-quoted lead sentence to this one from another article: "Baseball pocket billiards or baseball pool (sometimes, in context, referred to simply as baseball) is a pocket billiards (pool) game ...." The capitalization happening at a few games and sports articles appears to be simply because of a specialized-style fallacy (i.e. "the rulebooks I like use capitals, so WP has to as well"), or perhaps a misunderstanding of how MoS is applied, such as the common-style fallacy, that we use whatever 50.01% of the sources prefer). Regardless, it's just that no one's gotten around to lower-casing them yet due to topic obscurity, and this has generated a WP:VESTED sense of down-to-the-character control among a few editors actually watchlisting this small number of articles.

I'm obviously making a pro-lowercase argument here, based on our standard of not applying capitals (or any other style variation) unless mainstream RS do so with near uniformity. We apply this standard to everything, including camelcase, lower-case trademarks, substitutions of numerals or other symbols for letters and words, and so on, and it's applied dozens of times per week at WP:RM to down-case extraneous capitalization. I'm using RfC at this time because of the failure this week of RM to resolve a similar case, which then led directly to editwarring about the matter at another article. I do not believe a lone RM that was mostly ignored can be used as the basis to try to prevent guideline-compliance copyedits even at that article much less across all games articles, especially against guideline compliance and WP:CONSISTENCY policy.

But someone else may want to make a pro-caps argument here. Is there some kind of special exception to make for morris-type games? For all games? If so, on what basis?
 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ<  09:12, 1 January 2018 (UTC)

  • Please notify all of the appropriate projects, such as chess, gaming, games, sports, etc. of this discussion. Thanks. Randy Kryn (talk) 01:22, 2 January 2018 (UTC)
  • Make sure to notify at Talk:Go (game). --IHTS (talk) 02:46, 2 January 2018 (UTC)
    • RfCs run for an entire month if necessary, and this has already been "advertised" WP:VPPOL. The purpose of RfC is is to get broad not single-minded editorial input. Why on earth would I go WP:CANVASSING every game-related page to gin up a bloc-vote of specialized-style fallacy votes? If you notify topically-specific pages, do so neutrally per, and stop blatantly misrepresenting this RfC as having anthing to do with chess openings.

      I'm still waiting for your pro-capitalization argument, especially since this RfC only exists because of your pro-capitalization editwarring.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ<  07:10, 2 January 2018 (UTC)

      • What is application of your arguments re Go (game)? (Traditional game; RSs are split approx 50–50 according to Talk:Go (game) discussions including archived discussions; the argument accounting for consensus if I'm not mistaken is that editors at the page don't want readers to confuse the game name w/ the verb. Do your principles allow for argument like that to defeat your argument what is right or wrong for WP re lowercase/uppercase? And why haven't you applied your principles there, a major litmus test case, rather than picking less trafficked Nine Men's, & no-brainers like "baseball"? Oh, knock off w/ personal stuff, your behavior to lowercase Twelve Men's at a different article immediately after RfC closure denying lowercase for Nine Men's was rather inappropriate & underhanded. And I'm not sure why your past extremist views re "queen's gambit" have changed [I'll be reviewing to try to understand]. There are problems w/ this RfC, lack of definition what is different from MoS currently, for example. Lack of definition when a source is considered "specialist" & ignorable, versus "RS" & not. Lack of clarity beyond ambiguity in current MoS what is "preponderance". Lack of clarity where apparently you'll think you have authority to make game names lowercase, & if objected based on most sources, deny those sources are true RS. Those issues s/n be defined here, this discussion is reliant on existing definitions elsewhere, which need to be brought in here rather than indirectly implied. Any conclusion from abstract discussion can lead to much damage. I want to hear your take not only on go, but Chinese Checkers, Alice Chess, Grand Chess, Double Chess, and Onyx (game).) --IHTS (talk) 23:16, 2 January 2018 (UTC)
        I'm not surprised that there's been a 50/50 split about Go (game); it's a thorny case and illustrates why MoS is a guideline to which exceptions can apply when a consensus is actually achieved to apply one. However, I think the most sensible approach would be to use {{lang|ja-Latn|go}} [This just in! {{lang}} no longer requires manual italicization of stuff in Latin/Roman scripts. Huzzah!] on first occurrence and ''go'' thereafter; that's certainly what I would do, including in another article ("She is also a three-time world champion player of go." (NB: Observe how I wrote that to avoid ambiguity with the verb [to] go, for the benefit of anyone who can't get all that markup, e.g. because a WP:REUSE has stripped it to plain ASCII.) But someone will probably claims that [g|G]o has been assimilated sufficiently into the English language that we shouldn't italicize it, as with "sushi" and "karate".

        Regardless, dictionaries do not at all support this capitalization: Oxford, AHD, MW, TFD (also quoting AHD, Collins, RHKWCD, Dictionary.com (quoting RHD and Online Etym. Dict.), YD (quoting WNWCD, AHD, and – not that we care – Wiktionary); Cambridge does not list the Japanese-game-of-Chinese-origin meaning at all (so much for assimilation). The dictionaries unanimously present this in all-lowercase, though two observed that it's sometimes capitalized, and two or three also provided the i-go name. The fact that even specialized sources are 50/50 on it is a clear indication to use lowercase on Wikipedia; I've not gone over the [g|G]o debates, so I don't know what additional pro-capital-G arguments may have been offered; right now it looks like a losing argument.

        The existence of a dispute about one game with a rather ambiguous name does not indicate any kind of dispute across all games and sports, and there very definitely was not one until two editors (already commenting here) manufactured one out of thin air and one started editwarring about it without anything but a WP:ILIKEIT rationale.

        I do not make "what is right or wrong" arguments about style. See also WP:WINNING and WP:BATTLEGROUND; all this talk of "defeat your argument" has no place here. The point is to come to a consensus (more narrowly in this case to come to a consensus about whether existing consensus about avoiding capitalization of these things has somehow changed, and if so, on what basis).

        You really, really, really need to stop pointing WP:ASPERSIONS fingers at me or anyone else when it comes to style matters like this. I took nine men's morris to RM because I ran across it, and it was overcapitalized. If I'd run across go first, I would have done it first. There is no secret nefarious plan, and your accusations are getting really damned tiresome.

        Writing the name of a game without overcapitalizing it is not "much damage", it's normal English. Chinese checkers is is already lowercase. Grand Chess, Double Chess, and Onyx (game) are proper names; they're the published creative works of specific individuals in all three cases; whether they're legally trademarked or copyrighted is probably irrelevant (e.g. I can write a video game called Space Buttmonkeys and release it into the public domain, no rights reserved, and it doesn't suddenly become "space buttmonkeys"). All of this "don't you dare touch chess articles" posturing, however, highlights exactly which this RfC is needed, because there's obviously a WP:FACTION and WP:CONLEVEL policy problem in play [pun intended]
         — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ<  08:26, 4 January 2018 (UTC)

  • Interestingly, the more well-known games all seem to be lowercase. It may simply be that a dearth of traffic has left the more obscure games out of line with MOS guidelines. Primergrey (talk) 07:56, 2 January 2018 (UTC)
  • Question. What is the purpose of this RfC? (To make no change to MoS, to make no clarification to MoS, while at same time somehow hand carte blanche to SMcClandish to lowercase any articles he pleases, without consensus at respective article Talks?! He already demonstrated said intention to force his views at Morabaraba by refusing discussion WP:BRD after being reverted & statement here he doesn't want to discuss at Talks, even though articles may have own/individual countervailing factors?! Or not if SMcClandish says not?! Did I miss where MoS RfCs can hand out such arbitrary editing authority?) --IHTS (talk) 00:36, 3 January 2018 (UTC)
    It's a WP:CCC test, obviously. Various editors make tendentious, strenuous cases that our general rule that "only words and phrases that are consistently capitalized in a substantial majority of independent, reliable sources are capitalized in Wikipedia" absolutely must make an exception for their pet topic, that not making the exception is wrong, simply because an alleged majority of topically specialized writers prefer the capital letters. Some of their ideas are not well-supported in any kind of sourcing, such as the idea that the more familiar something is the more we should capitalize; that various capitalization approaches are strongly tied to one national form of English or another; that certain things have "become" proper nouns simply because of the frequency which which specialists capitalize them (pure circular reasoning: capitalize because it's a proper name and it's a proper name because it's capitalized), that WP should use capitalization as a form of inline disambiguation; and so on. These argument never stop until an RfC concludes against them, because they're a form belief based on a subjective sense of correctness, grounded either in "what I learned in Mrs. McGillicuddy's 7th grade English class" or "what I'm used to in the journals I read at work [or gamer blogs I write for, or whatever the case may be]". It's not fact established with sourcing, it's feeling. The fact established with sourcing is that the topical RS aren't consistent about this stuff at all, and sources that are actually reliable on how to most effectively write English are consistently against such over-capitalization (and other forms of over-stylization that we have to deal with frequently, like decorative mimicry of trademarks).

    Please stop attempting to personalize style disputes with nonsensical aspersion-casting. I'll take this up in user talk. And it really is nonsensical: It's not possible for an RM to be "without consensus at respective article Talks" when RM is a consensus discussion at the respective article Talk page. It's not possible for me to be refusing the "D" in BRD when I not only opened a discussion (the reverter did not), I made it an RfC to be sure that the discussion is as inclusive as possible rather than he-said-she-said between two editors. It's not possible for this RfC to "hand carte blanche to [anyone] to lowercase any articles [they] please" when its scope is limited to traditional games and sports, and has been narrowed even further since it was opened (e.g., to exclude chess openings). It's not possible for WT:MOS RfCs to "hand out ... arbitrary editing authority", because they're just RfCs at a guideline talk page. And so on. Nothing you've said bears any resemblance to reality.
     — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ<  07:25, 4 January 2018 (UTC)

Chess openings are off-topic

Refactored this FUD out of the comments section:

For context & perspective, here are earlier SMcCandlish lowercase discussions:

--IHTS (talk) 03:45, 2 January 2018 (UTC)

This has nothing whatsover to do with chess openings; no one said anything about them other than you and Randy. While it is actually easy to find a handful of lower-case examples in RS, including ones specifically about chess, for any random thing listed in Category:Chess openings, as well as strangely mixed casing like "Queen's gambit" and "poisoned Pawn variation" (examples, in no particular order: [23], [24], [25], [26], [27], [28], [29], [30], etc.), it's clear from both a cursory and an in-depth examination that chess openings are in fact capitalized with almost uniform consistency in reliable sources, and this is our standard. (Names of non-trademarked games and sports, and the equipment used in them are not, and fail that standard.)

Chess openings are basically creative works in a sense, a cerebral version of, say, the McTwist in skateboarding, the Lutz in figure skating, and Pardo's Push in aerial combat. Most of them are named after specific individuals.

What this RfC does have to do with is over-capitalizing things like "Chess", "Nine-ball", "Gin Rummy", and "Baseball Bat".
 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ<  07:10, 2 January 2018 (UTC)

Glad to see you've changed your position on the chess moves and added this after I pointed that out. It's things like that which concern me. Of course 'chess' and most others should be lower-cased (Baseball Bat is actually upper-cased? that's a weird one [EDIT: no, it isn't, is there another game with that name?]), so no, we don't have as big a difference as you are imagining. Randy Kryn (talk) 12:09, 2 January 2018 (UTC)
Again, please stop making this some kind of adversarial "positions must change" WP:BATTLEGROUND. My "position" has not changed. I suggested moving an article because the move looked more compliant than the existing name. In the course of the RM it was determined that the sources actually overwhelmingly prefer the version that matches the extant name of the page thus it should not move after all. No one's "position" on anything changed. The only thing that changed was unclear sourcing became clear.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ<  07:12, 5 January 2018 (UTC)
A 'thank you for your good faith comment' would have been more in order. My comment was not battleground or battleship or adversarial. In the past you wanted to lower-case the names of chess moves (see this RM at Queen's Gambit), and would have done so if other editors hadn't intervened. They were not battlegrounding you either, they were clarifying and protecting a proper name. That RM and other concerns was my reason for questioning the open-ended way this RfC language may have, if passed, affected the chess moves which, in the past, you did want to lower-case. If you have said before that you didn't want to change those I apologize for missing it. This section clarified your thinking, and that's appreciated, and removes most of my concerns about this RfC. That's what good faith discussions on Wikipedia are for. If you think this is battlegrounding then maybe you can instead imagine one of those Christmas truces, where in the midst of battle (or in this case, non-battle) editors can shake hands, pass around the ale, and sing "Land of Hope and Glory" in honor of Wikipedia. This might make it easier to see my viewpoint, why my concern was real, and why you letting us know that chess terminology wasn't included in this request is appreciated. Randy Kryn (talk) 10:54, 5 January 2018 (UTC)
Maybe "I Know Him So Well" from Chess might be more appropriate? Martinevans123 (talk) 11:41, 5 January 2018 (UTC)
Well, I suggested "Land of Hope and Glory" because that's one of the songs the soldiers sang during the Christmas truce, and if thinking that the song is about Wikipedia instead of England, which is how I was thinking of it, then it kind of fits {such as about 50 seconds into this one, which was filmed at the 1962 Wikimania conference, where Larry suggested we all wear coat and tails). But, okay, if your idea wins approval I call dibs on the shorter avatar. Randy Kryn (talk) 20:05, 5 January 2018 (UTC)
The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

fellowships and fellows

What is the recipe for writing "fellows" and "fellowships" (for example in the "Bradley Foundation Fellows" or "Bradley Foundation Fellowship")? Capital or small? Ali Pirhayati (talk) 06:44, 31 January 2018 (UTC)

Tricky... I think we would write "In 2018, he was made a Fellow of the Bradley Foundation"... and I think we would also write "In 2018, he was made a Bradley Foundation Fellow" ... however, I think we would write: In 2018 he was granted a Bradley Foundation fellowship". I could be wrong, however. Blueboar (talk) 13:16, 31 January 2018 (UTC)
But "fellow" is a common noun. See macmillandictionary.com: "a fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge". Or oxforddictionaries.com: "he was elected a fellow of the Geological Society". I see no reason to capitalize, as the meaning is the same in upper case and lower case. In "a Bradley Foundation fellow" we simply have a proper name modifying a common noun, no different than in "a Bradley Foundation employee". Chris the speller yack 15:14, 31 January 2018 (UTC)
I see it the same way as Chris the speller. The person is a "Bradley Foundation fellow", while the "Bradley Foundation Fellowship" is a named program and hence a proper noun.  SchreiberBike | ⌨  18:56, 31 January 2018 (UTC)
What about “Fellow of the Royal Society”? Blueboar (talk) 16:01, 1 February 2018 (UTC)
@Blueboar: I'd read MOS:JOBTITLES as saying it should be lower case. It says we capitalize "When a formal title (or conventional translation thereof) is addressed as a title or position in and of itself, is not plural, is not preceded by a modifier (including a definite or indefinite article), and is not a reworded description". List of Fellows of the Royal Society and the lists under it definately go against that. If we say that Newton was a president of the Royal Society we wouldn't capitalize "president", why would we capitalize his title when we say he was a fellow? We don't capitalize something because it's important, we capitalize it if it's a proper noun. A specific fellowship can be a proper noun, but a fellow is no more a proper noun than a plumbler. I recognize that defining a proper noun/proper name gets complicated around the edges, but that's how I see it.  SchreiberBike | ⌨  22:55, 1 February 2018 (UTC)
And yet, I think you would get a LOT of push back if you tried to decapitalize “Fellow” and “Fellows” at the Royal Society article. It is a VERY prestigious designation... one that is routinely capitalized in the real world. Blueboar (talk) 23:34, 1 February 2018 (UTC)
Unfortunate, if true, that fans of a such an intellectual society would be ignorant of what having a house style means. Primergrey (talk) 00:07, 2 February 2018 (UTC)
Same rule as always applies: if RS don't consistently capitalize it, WP doesn't either, and you have to pay attention to the grammatical and semantic context. Fellow is consistently capitalized only when tacked onto a name as a post-nominal (and such things are usually abbreviated, FSTS, etc., except on résumés). There's virtually never just a single fellow in any fellowship program, so it it is a common noun by definition. This is basically the same as professorships - they're only capitalized when tacked directly onto a name:
  • According to Professor Jane Q. Doe, an economist at Foobar University ...
  • Jane Q. Doe is a professor of economics at Foobar University.
  • According to J. C. Thompson, Fellow of the Scottish Tartans Society, ...
  • More likely on Wikipedia: According to J. C. Thompson, {{post-nominals|list=[[Scottish Tartans Society|FSTS]]}}, ... which renders as: According to J. C. Thompson, FSTS, ...
  • J. C. Thompson, a researcher of Highland cultural history, was made a fellow of the Scottish Tartan Society.
We shouldn't capitalize "fellowship" unless the fellowship program itself is the subject and we're using the word in a proper name:
  • Doe also received a Bradley Foundation fellowship as a post-graduate student. Or:
  • Doe also received a fellowship from the Bradley Foundation as a post-graduate student.
  • The foundation established its Bradley Fellowship Program in 1986.
"Fellows" is the same case as a board of directors or similar body, and again only capitalized when treated as a proper-name subject in its own right:
  • Two other professors in the department were also Bradley Foundation fellows.
  • Seven graduate and post-graduate students at the institution are are also Bradley fellows, and 12 have scholarships from the Fullbright Program.
  • One of professors is today on the board of directors of the Bradley Foundation.
  • The Bradley Fellows, as a body, number in the thousands and do not meet in person.
  • The organization's charter requires that: 1) the Bradley Foundation Board of Directors must meet at least once annually with a quorum; 2) it must be constituted of at least 15 elected members; 3) ....
Sponsored endowments are capitalized when given in full as proper names:
  • David J. Farber was appointed Alfred Fitler Moore Professor of Telecommunication Systems at the University of Pennsylvania.
  • David J. Farber is a professor of telecommunications systems at the University of Pennsylvania.
 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  19:45, 18 February 2018 (UTC)

We should probably clarify that "law", "statute", "act", "bill", "regulation", etc., are not capitalized when not used in an actual title of a legal work (or a conventional short name thereof, e.g. Peel's Acts). E.g., use "There were two separate sets of broadly identical acts for England and Ireland", not "There were two separate sets of broadly identical Acts for England and Ireland". There are thousands of over-capitalizations like this; it seems to be the same "the Party of the First Part to this Contract" habit of lawyers.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ<  19:04, 18 January 2018 (UTC)

Agree completely. Chris the speller yack 17:42, 27 January 2018 (UTC)
  • One exception... “Law” is usually capitalized when discussed as an abstract concept (as in “Magna Carta established that even monarchs were subject to the rule of Law.” or “Force gave way to Law as the basis for society”.) Blueboar (talk) 19:08, 27 January 2018 (UTC)
    Nah, that's an affectation. It's precisely the same one as "fighting for Truth and Justice". I read tremendous amounts of history and culture material, and things like "gave way to Law as the basis of society" (why didn't you capitalize "Society"?) are no longer typical in English, including in the relevant fields. (I don't read a lot of legal theory material; it may be that law journals tend to use "Law" when they mean it in the broad conceptual sense, but I'd want to see proof of that before I believed it, and it would still just be a specialized-style fallacy WP wouldn't use anyway, for the same reason we don't use "Theory of General Relativity" or "a Romance novel" or "She is an Associate Professor of Applied Linguistics.")  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  22:11, 18 February 2018 (UTC)

L'Hôpital's rule

Our article at L'Hôpital's rule inconsistently capitalizes the the "L" in the name here. It seems that when the name is used by itself (as in the article on Guillaume de l'Hôpital himself), the "L" is written lower case. However, if you take "L'Hôpital's rule" to be a proper noun, perhaps the "L" really should be capitalized. I'm really at a loss about what's better/correct here. Can anyone provide any advice? Thanks, –Deacon Vorbis (carbon • videos) 15:40, 9 February 2018 (UTC)

I see only one inconsistent use at the mathematical article ("l'Hôpital's rule may be used to determine that"). Otherwise, I see inconsistency in print sources. My print Britannica uses "L'Hôpital" when referring to Marcel, the 16th century statesman (but shows nothing on the mathematician, and Wikipedia seems to have nothing on Marcel). Thomas's Calculus has it as "l'Hôpital", when discussing the rule, but another calculus book has it otherwise. So, as might be appropriate, the usage is indeterminate. Dhtwiki (talk) 22:24, 9 February 2018 (UTC)
  • This is the same question as whether it should be de Anza or De Anza, von Braun or Von Braun, van der Schaaf or Van der Schaaf (or even Van Der Schaaf), when used without the given names. Since usage is mixed, go with lower case by default (except at start of a sentence or some other place we always start with a capital letter); the first rule of MOS:CAPS is don't capitalize something unless almost all the RS do so consistently for that particular case. For particular individuals for whom a particular pattern is overwhelmingly the most common, use that pattern. And apply common sense. Writing "according to L'Hôpital's rule" is like writing "within The Chicago subway system"; why on earth is the definite article being capitalized in mid-sentence? I'm not sure where people get the idea that proper names should be monkeyed with after they're turned into eponyms. If something bore my name [31], would it be okay to rewrite my name as "mac Candlish" when referring to it, just because you prefer traditionalist orthography for Scottish names? I don't think so. (Adjectives can sometimes be an exception, modelled on things like Cartesian from des Cartes; perhaps Candlishian would evolve from McCandlish, and Hôpitalien from l'Hôpital?)

    A few external style guides suggest capitalizing such names when they stand alone (L'Hôpital, De Anza, Van der Schaaf, etc.). I think this works poorly here, because we have zillions of editors who are not going to internalize the distinction, and who will then go write Guillaume de L'Hôpital. I've seen one style guide that wants to do it differently based on the root language (IIRC, it would have von Braun but Van der Schaaf, based on differences in typical German and Dutch usage), but this strikes me as a bad idea, because we're writing in English, not German or Dutch, and again the average editor will not grok the difference, so will go around changing things to Wernher Von Braun or whatever. We also have the complication of Americans, Canadians, and others with such surnames, treating them differently. E.g., Googling "van der schaaf" I encounter van der Schaaf, Van der Schaaf, and Van Der Schaaf, plus Vander Schaaf and Vanderschaaf, all in current use. For modern subjects (especially living ones) we should prefer the spelling used by the person in question, per WP:ABOUTSELF. For historical ones, use what the majority of English-language sources use, since orthography was not a settled matter when people like Juan Bautista de Anza were living. This also applies to organization names and other trademarks; the name of the institution is De Anza College with a capital D; if you start a company named de Anza Film Studios and it become notable, we should render the name with the lower-case d.

    We may need to add something to this effect, probably to MOS:BIO. I can't find any mention of it at MOS:BIO, WP:NCBIO, MOS:CAPS, or WP:NCCAPS.
     — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  20:33, 17 February 2018 (UTC)

Checking "Walter de la Mare" in Google Books, I find De la Mare, de la Mare, de La Mare and sometimes De La Mare. There is a certain logic to each of these. Robert J. Van de Graaff's machine is a Van de Graaff generator but the rock group is Van der Graaf Generator. I don't think we can define any logical rule, just whatever in mostly commonly used. I would say the rule should be "whatever capitalization is found most often in English-language results from a search of Google Books". Aymatth2 (talk) 23:32, 17 February 2018 (UTC)
That's probably a poor choice because it includes obsolete material (often super-duper obsolete, like from 1847). This came up in discussion of PLOS One. They used to render it PLoS One, but haven't in years, and the current journals that cite it generally use PLOS One, but Google Books results prefer PLoS One because they're saturated with older publications (meanwhile news writers tend to imitate the logo stylization and render it as PLOS ONE, as if the "One" part is also an acronym, which it is not). We generally have to look at sourcing more broadly.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  17:38, 18 February 2018 (UTC)
Good point. Maybe something like "whatever style is found most often in reliable sources, giving greatest weight to recently published sources. If there is no dominant style in these sources, the style used by the first main contributor to the article should be followed." Something like that. This seems like a broad principle that would apply to a lot of style issues. It seems that there should be a standard formula. Aymatth2 (talk) 18:07, 18 February 2018 (UTC)
@SMcCandlish:: "This is the same question as whether it should be de Anza or De Anza, von Braun or Von Braun..." Not quite. I agree with you that nobiliary particles should be lower case by default, but French names incorporating de La or de L' are a slightly different matter. In the vast majority of these names only the "de" is the nobiliary particle, and the definite article is an integral part of the place name from which the family name is derived. As the article is capitalised in the place name, so it is capitalised in the family name: François de La Rochefoucauld (of La Rochefoucauld); Henri de La Tour d'Auvergne, vicomte de Turenne (of La Tour-d'Auvergne); Louis Jean Marie de La Trémoille (of La Trimouille). We don't really do this with place names in English, but when you say "writing 'according to L'Hôpital's rule' is like writing 'within The Chicago subway system'", a better comparison would be "within The Hague tram network". I don't know from which of several places called L'Hôpital the mathematician's family took its name, but they all use capital L, and because of this I would spell his name with a capital L too, and by extension the rule as well.
Having said that: there is of course inconsistency even in French usage. The French Wikipedia has fr:Guillaume François Antoine, marquis de L'Hôpital and fr:règle de L'Hôpital as article titles, but uses capital and lower case L inconsistently within both. I just wanted to make the point that L' isn't the same as Von or De. Opera hat (talk) 01:51, 19 February 2018 (UTC)
But if even fr.wikipedia can't get it "right", then there's not an actual rule there we should try to follow. This is English, and if we start making an exception for French, the something like 40% of people who think about it will want a Dutch exception, and x% will want a Spanish one, and we'll end up having to have a page that's a list of these particles and what to do with them, and no one will remember any of it. On this site, we should do something consistent with all of them, since the real world just does whatever the writer at hand feels like, even in French.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  02:23, 19 February 2018 (UTC)
I don't really understand why you would want to impose a consistency on Wikipedia that you admit doesn't exist in the real world. Surely your earlier suggestion to use whatever reliable sources use on a case-by-case basis is the better one. Opera hat (talk) 23:22, 21 February 2018 (UTC)
Imposing consistency on willy-nilly variation is the main reason style guides exist, and it's pretty much the sole purpose of WP's MoS. We've tried the other approach and it leads to more dispute than it resolves, except in a few narrow areas that style guides that MoS is based on cannot help us with, other than by an arbitrary rule. About the only solid example is what to do with excessively stylized trademarks – there is no authoritative list 100,000+ of them and how to stylize each, and they're too different for blanket algorithm, so our rule is to not do anything unusual in rendering a trademark unless almost all reliable sources also do it consistently for that particular trademark. Trying to apply this approach to capitalization in general has been an abject failure. I don't think a single thing we've tried with regard to MoS has wasted more time or led to more dispute, especially at WP:RM. It's a daily, often multiple-times-daily, source of a strife, because everyone is going to game the sourcing to try to get the version they want, and the entire exercise of trying to figure out what a preponderance of the sources are doing is patently original research, with easily manipulated and often statistically invalid corpora (e.g. hits in various Google searches) that are difficult to do appropriately even when people are not trying to fudge them intentionally.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  14:41, 22 February 2018 (UTC)
@Opera hat: I have Louis Le Provost de Launay(fr) on my "to do" list, but now I am unsure about the right capitalization. Aymatth2 (talk) 02:36, 21 February 2018 (UTC)
Well, I would use a capital L, but I'm sure you could find sources that didn't. Opera hat (talk) 23:22, 21 February 2018 (UTC)

Returning to the original question: if you spell his name with a capital L, spell the rule with a capital L. If you spell his name with a lower case L, spell the rule with a lower case L. Opera hat (talk) 23:22, 21 February 2018 (UTC)

Yep. Though we need an algorithm to answer that "if" in the first place. We're being too inconsistent and it causes too much "WTF do I do with this?" confusion, and disputes.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  14:31, 22 February 2018 (UTC)

Scouting conflict with MOS:DOCTCAPS, MOS:JOBTITLE

Wikipedia:WikiProject Scouting/Style advice directly conflicts with MOS:DOCTCAPS, and demands capitalization of "scout" or "guide" in constructions like "a group of 50 scouts" (the Wikiprojects wants "a group of 50 Scouts"). This also conflicts with MOS:JOBTITLE and everything else we do. The wikiproject advice page is fine when it calls for "Eagle Scout" and other specific awards being capitalized as proper names. But it's flat wrong on "scout" and "guide" for exactly the same reasons as being discussed above for "airman" and "marine". While scouting-related publications like to capitalize, just as military ones do, this is the specialized-style fallacy, the imposition onto Wikipedia of an off-site concern's insider, aggrandizing house style. The capitalization of "Scouting" as a movement is probably permissible (in reference to organizations that are actually formally a part of it, not just similar to it), because it's not a vague movement like "house-music DJing" or "anti-gun activism", but a hierarchical and organized system, like the International Olympic Committee and all the international sport federations it comprises. However, "Scouting Movement" is over-capitalization again; it should be Scouting movement, or simply Scouting, or (depending on context), Scouting organization, Scouting organisation, Scouting leadership, Scouting facilities, etc. You can't just capitalize very word that follows "Scouting" because you think capital letters look nifty. The actual proper name of the Scouting movement as a defined thing is World Organization of the Scout Movement, which of course does get capitalized.

The over-capitalization has been present since the original version of the essay in 2007 [32] and is not the product of any kind of discussion, but simply what the writer of almost all of it, Gadget850, preferred.

Some of this has been argued over previously, without resolution, in March 2017:

Disclaimer: I was a scout from around age 6 in the UK to 18 in the US, and continued in the Explorers until 20. I have the furthest thing from a prejudice against scouting.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  23:59, 18 February 2018 (UTC)

Update and self-correction: Actually, the case for capital-S "Scouting" is also weak, because there are numerous scouting organizations with no affiliation at all to international bodies for the movement (see Category:Non-aligned Scouting organizations, List of non-aligned Scouting organizations, Non-aligned Scouting and Scout-like organisations); i.e., this is a diffuse movement, like veganism, not closely tied to a particular international organization (the proper name of which doesn't contain "Scouting" anyway).  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  21:17, 19 February 2018 (UTC)
My take... in this case, the capitalization of “Scout” is used (and needed) to distinguish a member of these kids organizations from the military job of “scout”. It is similar to the distinction between “republican” and “Republican” noted in WP:DOCTCAPS.
Another example of this is the way we distinguish between a “mason” (ie one who builds buildings out of stone or brick) and a “Mason” (ie a member of the fraternal order of Freemasonry). Blueboar (talk) 00:26, 19 February 2018 (UTC)
That doesn't make any sense at all to me, since a) no one is going to confuse a 13-year-old with with a military man; b) the over-capitalization doesn't mean anything to anyone but people deeply involved in one WOSM affiliate or another (the main reason to not use it here); and c) the express intent of the creator of the kids'-club movement was to model it on military scouting in the first place. It's like wanting to capitalize "High School Football" in the context of kids's sports to distinguish it from professional, adult activity.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  02:27, 19 February 2018 (UTC)
  • Agree with Blueboar, profoundly disagree with SMcCandlish and his mischaracterization "because you think capital letters look nifty", vide Rotary vs. rotary, Lions vs. lions, etc.--Kintetsubuffalo (talk) 01:49, 19 February 2018 (UTC)
  • I'm leaning towards Blueboar's view, finding the Mason argument convincing. If I were to refer to a member of the Miami Marlins baseball team as a "marlin" instead of a "Marlin", it would look like I was calling him a fish. Closer to the subject, I don't know about elsewhere, but in the American Girl Scouts, the younger girls are called Brownies. They certainly aren't small-b brownies. And Scouts, after all, aren't really scouts. No one is sending them into the wilderness to find suitable land for a new settlement or to spy on the enemy. And Guides aren't giving tours of Westminster Abbey. The names really are comparable to big-R Republicans. Largoplazo (talk) 02:12, 19 February 2018 (UTC)
    "Brownie" isn't descriptive, but methaphoric/evocative, so it's a proper name. Scout is descriptive of the activity set and the purpose. Brownie is also entirely specific to a particular organization (like "I'm a Democrat" in reference to the US Democratic Praty), while "scout" is a generic term applied to participants in all scouting organizations, including those not affiliated with the international federation that includes many of them, and unaffiliated with anything else at all.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  21:17, 19 February 2018 (UTC)
    You're not comparing similar things. Scouting is an activity. Marlining is not, nor is Masoning or Rotaring or Lioning. More the point, you're all missing that the names of these things – except Scouting – are figural and evocative, not descriptive. Masons, in the sense of Freemasonry, have nothing to do with bricklaying. The Rotary Club is not related in any way to turning something. The Miami Marlins don't do anything underwater. The Lions Club has no connection to roaring on the plains and chasing antelope. Scouting is a descriptive label, however; it's primarily about learning skills that would be applicable to the military role. That was the very reason the Baden-Powell created the organization in the first place.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  02:36, 19 February 2018 (UTC)
Sure... Baden-Powell originally created Scouting to teach boys skills they would need for scouting. Read that last sentence carefully. Without the capitalization the sentence makes a lot less sense. Blueboar (talk) 12:58, 19 February 2018 (UTC)
But no one's been arguing against "Scouting" [I will start to do so below, given new information], only against "Scout", for the same reason we have the US Marine Corps (and the Spanish Navy Marines, and the Syrian Marines, and ...), but "A. B. Ceesdale is a retired marine" (not "Marine"). But if we did object to capital-S "Scouting", the material and the distinction would still not be problematic in any way, we'd just apply common-sense clear writing: "Baden-Powell originally the created scouting youth movement to teach boys skills they would need for scouting in the military." How is this not super-duper obvious?  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  21:17, 19 February 2018 (UTC); revised: 08:26, 23 February 2018 (UTC)
  • All of this hinges on the fact that a verb "to scout" was derived from "Scouts" to describe the activities in which Scouts engage? If the Masons started referring to their activities as "Masoning", Wikipedia would move quickly to lower-case all references to them?
Also, I already noted that "Scouts" and "Guides" are no more scouts and guides than Brownies are brownies, so those names are just as figurative. Baden-Powell wasn't running a school that was intended literally to turn out scouts. Or, if he was, his success rate was atrocious. I don't think a single Scout I've ever known used their training to become an actual scoutLargoplazo (talk) 02:53, 19 February 2018 (UTC)
Just to inform the discussion... the activities of the fraternal order are referred to as “Masonry”... as opposed to the activity of “masonry” (stone and brick laying). interestingly, I have only seen the adjectival form, “Masonic”, used in the context of the fraternal order (does the profession even have an adjectival form?)... and there it is routinely capitalized.
Getting back to Scouting...SMcC... could you address the “Republican” vs “republican” example in WP:DOCTCAPS, and how it might (or might not) relate to “Scouting” vs “scouting”? Blueboar (talk) 11:53, 19 February 2018 (UTC)
It's exactly the same as "a Lutheran" and "a Roman Catholic", labelling an adherent to an ideology that is treated as a proper name and is tied to a specific organization, while many others are usually not ("capitalist", "yogin", "flat-earther", "cladist"); and note that "catholic" still survives as generic term, like "republican", though the former is rarely used today. By contrast, "scout" is descriptive of a persuer of a set of activities or approaches, like "home brewer", "scientist", "pool player", "marine", "method actor", etc., and the movement around Scouting (which is not always capitalized in this context), is actually rather diffuse; while there is an international organization for it (two, actually, counting World Assn. of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts), if you look into it, the national bodies are all independent and there are scouting organizations that are not a part of the international one; we have entire (clumsily named) articles on this, at Non-aligned Scouting and Scout-like organisations and List of non-aligned Scouting organizations (the capitalization here can't be correct, since there's no tie to the centralized organizations that allegedly give rise to capital-S Scouting in the first place, and "Scout-like" is just an abuse of language, since no organization is like an individual youth). I.e., there are lots of youth scouting organizations that are proper names, just as there are lots of marine infantry bodies, pool leagues, science organizations, and home-brewing clubs that are proper names, but it's doesn't make the personal labels proper names. Note also how deeply buried in the Category:Scouting tree Category:World Organization of the Scout Movement member organizations is.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  21:17, 19 February 2018 (UTC)
All of these examples appear to fall to "capitalisation" for distinction, rather than whether they are truly a matter of being used as proper nouns. This is not something subscribed to by the MOS. One might suggest that "Scout" is a shortened form of the full and proper name. As indicated in the discussion of marine v Marine, such would only apply if the shortened form could be replaced for the full and proper name without other change to the sentence construction and without an error in fact arising from such a substitution. The MOS does not subscribe to shortened forms being capitalised in general. They are not "proper names/nouns" Shortended forms are not the same as capitalising "Londoners" or "Toyota cars".

Doctrines, philosophies, theologies, theories, movements, methods, processes, systems of thought and practice, and fields of study are not capitalized, unless the name derives from a proper name: lowercase republican refers to a system of political thought; uppercase Republican refers to a specific Republican Party (each being a proper name).

The advice here refers to capitalising "republican" in the case of "Republican Party", which is a proper name, as opposed to the "gay rights movement". I read the example as a distiction between "the republican party" v "the Republican Party". If it means something else, then, it should be clear as to what it means. There is also the mater of the "distinction" between military scouts and members of the "S|scouts" (of America or somewhere else, where the name is not given in full). There are military units "designated" as "scouts", such as the Alamo Scouts. How does capitalising scout distinguish the youth movement from these if capitalisation for distinction or shortened forms becomes the norm and this (one or the other) is the basis for capitalising in respect to the youth movement. If there are "general" exceptions to the MOS, these cases should be clearly articulated. In short, if this is what the community wants, then it is a major shift in the guidance given, that would require a consensus - which is, frankly, unlikely (as a realistic observation). I don't have an "axe" to grind, except to make things clear an unambiguous. Regards, Cinderella157 (talk) 14:33, 19 February 2018 (UTC)
Perhaps the MOS needs to pay more attention to capitalization used for distinction. After all, there is a huge semantic difference between “During the Trump administration the US had a republican goverment” and “During the Trump administration the US had a Republican government.” Both are accurate statements, but they MEAN very different things. Blueboar (talk) 15:09, 19 February 2018 (UTC)
But that's not capitalization for distinction (signification, a form of emphasis); it's capitalization in the latter case because it's a proper adjective, referring directly to the the proper name [the] Republican Party. It's exactly the same as Roman Catholic (frequently abbreviated Catholic) versus the generic adjective catholic. The more you look at it, the less youth scouting appears to be a proper name at all. Cinderella157's nailed this: If the Alamo Scouts and other proper-name military units have people in them referred to as scouts not Scouts (just as the US Marines, Syrian Marines, etc., are made up of marines not Marines in normal English), then why would the Boy Scouts of America, Scouting Ireland, etc., etc., be comprised of "Scouts"? It's pure vanity capitalization. As noted above, it couldn't rationally be applied to "non-aligned" scouting organizations that are not part of the loose international federation at all, since that federation is the (weak) justification for ever capitalizing "Scouting" in the first place.

The same rationale offered for capital-S "Scouting" would also result in capital-B "Basketball" (another invention by a particular person of a youth-oriented group activity which has turned into an international and somewhat standardized set of actions and practice of them, rulebooks, standard-issue equipment, and hierarchical structure from local to international level, and has spawned formal, incorporated organizations that employ adults in considerable numbers). There are just two reasons people want to capitalize scouting: to emphasize it, a rationale we do not accept, and to disambiguate it from the military activity, which is far better done with plain English ("youth scouting" or more specifically "boy scouting", "girl scouting", or "the scouting movement", versus "military scouting" or something more specific in context, e.g. "an Israeli Army scouting mission into Palestine" or whatever) than very incorrectly supposing that readers are going to magically understand that "Scouting" refers to kids and "scouting" refers to solidiers.

It's a silly false dichotomy anyway, since "scouting" has other meanings, and talent scouting (e.g. in sports and performing arts) is probably more familiar to the average, modern, entertainment-media-saturated reader than either military scouting (more often called recon) or the youth scouting movement (which is in a serious participation slump, probably an all-time low, though I've not researched that in detail). There is nothing unusual or different about this specialized-style overcapitalization case compared to the all the others we've been over before.
 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  21:17, 19 February 2018 (UTC)

Well, looks like we are both firm in our opinions and won’t convince the other. You see my take on it as a case of over-capitalization... I see your take on it as a case of over-decapitalization. We should probably both sit back and let others decide. Blueboar (talk) 21:43, 19 February 2018 (UTC)
Yeah, I can't think of anything further to add, and trying to reply to multiple parties at once had me saying some of the same things twice. PS: However, there's a bit of a false equivalence here. I've endeavored to refute your argument, and you're now remaining silent, without addressing my rebuttal.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  18:57, 20 February 2018 (UTC); revised: 14:45, 22 February 2018 (UTC)
I figured that I had responded and that we were both just repeating ourselves... but let me try again... Because the word "scouting" is ambiguous (referring to many different activities), it is my belief that the clarification in meaning and understanding gained by capitalizing the word "Scouting" in the context of discussing the Boy Scouts (and related orgs) outweighs your more grammatical concerns. In addition, I also see a parallel with the similar clarification in meaning achieved by the routine capitalization of words like "Masonic" and "Republican" in similar organizational contexts. Blueboar (talk) 16:13, 22 February 2018 (UTC)
  • I'm in full agreement that, in the context of how we already treat very similar subjects, there really is no exceptional circumstance here that justifies capitalization of this particular activity. Primergrey (talk) 22:28, 20 February 2018 (UTC)
  • Scout and Scouting capitalized, I just saw this, are we really going to act on good faith and lower-case Scout or Scouting? For example: "the scout became a scout after training with an old scout and another scout and then went back to camp to teach his fellow scouts to scout". Upper-case is used throughout the Scout universe, from the names of organizations to how other Scouts personally address their fellow Scouts. Randy Kryn (talk) 21:23, 25 February 2018 (UTC)

While I can see the argument for Scout, I'm honestly baffled by Scouting being capped. It was asked earlier if Masons had an activity called masoning, would we downcase it. Of course we would. The President of France presides, the Prime Minister of Canada ministers, members of the Auto Workers' Union work on autos, the King's Singers sing, etc. Primergrey (talk)

However... unlike Presidents who “preside” and Ministers who “minister”... the Boy Scouts, Cub Scouts, Girl Scouts, and Brounies don’t actually “scout” (nor do the Girl Guides actually “guide”)... so we use capitalization to indicate that they do something different. Blueboar (talk) 22:10, 25 February 2018 (UTC)

21:49, 25 February 2018 (UTC)

Agree with Primergrey and struck out 'Scouting' in my comment. Randy Kryn (talk) 21:52, 25 February 2018 (UTC)

African-American (c/C)ivil (r/R)ights (m/M)ovement – again

FYI
 – Pointer to relevant discussion elsewhere.

Please see Talk:African-American civil rights movement (1954–1968)#Requested move 18 February 2018.

This has turned full-on WP:PERENNIAL at this point.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  14:28, 22 February 2018 (UTC)

I actually had to look up the edit history, as I thought that someone had put the announcement up and forgot to sign, and you commented. But it seems you put a pointer announcement up, got it a bit wrong (user Coffee has proposed that the name be changed to simply "Civil Rights Movement", capitalized) and then added the "full-on" good faith kind-of-an-insult to the announcement (as well as the unneeded "- again" in the section head). This is a very relevant discussion with a large amount of evidence in favor of capitalization brought forward by the nominator, Coffee, and by user Mitchum, and it has received good support. Coffee has made it into an RfC. I would ask that those interested in exploring this topic read the entire nomination and comments, including the discussion section. Thanks. Randy Kryn (talk) 21:08, 25 February 2018 (UTC)
Hi SMcCandlish. Relating to your term "full-on WP:PERENNIAL", I don't think it that has anything to do with this RM suggestion. The term in the title 'Civil Rights Movement' had been stable for a long time, and then at the end of 2014, if I've got the timing right, there was an RM to decapitalize the term. That RM failed as a 'no consensus', and the term Civil Rights Movement remained capitalized for nearly three more years, until mid-late 2017, when a new RM, which included many other articles along with this one, lower-cased it . That was almost three years since the last RM, and I don't know when an RM was held previous to that. I don't think WP:PERENNIAL applies here, and maybe you'd consider striking it, as well as 'again' in the title. Thanks. Randy Kryn (talk) 16:06, 26 February 2018 (UTC)
If you want to quibble with me about my post wording, please use user talk. "Perennial" is the exact WP jargon for re-re-re-arguing the same thing indefinitely, and people have been arguing in the same vein about the title of that and related articles for years. We have an entire WP:PERENNIAL page about it (though for site-wide matters, not micro-topical ones, or the page would be 100 × longer – it's illustrative not exhaustive).  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  06:42, 28 February 2018 (UTC)
The title was stable for a long time, including during and after the 2014 RM which kept the upper-casing, until November 2017 when the page was lumped into a large move and became lower-cased. There is no perennial issue here, and your section title above ("again"), and the announcement of the RM itself (now an RfC), do seem biased. Maybe from your viewpoint you don't see that, or from mine I'm seeing something that's not there (but it's there, no?). Randy Kryn (talk) 13:42, 28 February 2018 (UTC)
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