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Conference Finals and Semifinals capitalization

Some of my sports case fixing edits got reverted with the assertion that "Conference Finals" and "Conference Semifinals" are proper names (I presume he meant just "Eastern Conference Finals", etc.). There is indeed a trend toward more capitalization in recent decades, but overall the book n-grams don't make these look like proper names; that is, capitalization appears to be very optional, per book sources. It's clear that "Eastern Conference" and "Western Conference" are proper names, but I can't see why we'd extend that to their finals and semifinals. Thoughts? Dicklyon (talk) 22:28, 20 February 2023 (UTC)

Best to leave'em as they are. GoodDay (talk) 22:56, 20 February 2023 (UTC)
MLS's playoff rounds are given proper names (except the First round and final). Much like how we capitalize "Playoffs" in "MLS Cup Playoffs", since they are not a generic term like semifinals would be in other competitions; MLS based their structure on other American sports leagues, where the penultimate playoff games are given proper titles (e.g. AFC/NFC Championships in NFL, League Championship Series in MLB). SounderBruce 23:20, 20 February 2023 (UTC)
Where can I find more about your interpretation that "MLS's playoff rounds are given proper names"? Are they listed as such somewhere? Actually, I see in some (most?) of your reverts (like this one), you're actually asserting that "Conference Semifinals" and "Conference Finals" are proper names, even without the conference names. This is highly contradicted by source usage. And I'm not arguing about what MLS calls them, just whether they are proper names, as evidenced by consistent capitalization in sources -- which they're not. Similarly plenty of books use lowercase playoffs in MLS Cup playoffs, the playoff tournament leading to the MLS Cup. Dicklyon (talk) 00:26, 21 February 2023 (UTC)
Note that nbcsports.com writes "The final will be held on Saturday, Nov. 5. There will be three rounds – the first round, conference semifinals and conference finals – before the ultimate showdown." Dicklyon (talk) 00:31, 21 February 2023 (UTC)
And espn.com similarly in their "MLS Cup playoffs conference finals preview". And nytimes.com with "The conference semifinals, which are single-game elimination matches, start on Thursday and will wrap up on Sunday. The conference finals are scheduled for Oct. 30, and the M.L.S. Cup final is ...". Dicklyon (talk) 00:39, 21 February 2023 (UTC)
One local NBC website and an autogenerated ESPN report are not good enough sources; the New York Times has their own style guide (hence "M.L.S.") and cannot be used as a benchmark. I'm not sure where ngrams is pulling their data from, but there certainly weren't MLS books written before the league debuted in 1996. The round names are not generic terms due to the league's structure, and the league's website (which has editorial independence) uses the capitalized form. The league's own materials (season preview, match report, MLS Cup media guides, etc.) use it as well. SounderBruce 00:43, 21 February 2023 (UTC)
The older hits are mostly NBA basketball, I think. The ones I cited from common modern publishers are about MLS; not as definitive style guidance, but as evidence that these are not consistently capitalized in independent reliable sources. The preferred style of the MLS is of course to cap stuff important to them; there's nothing for us in those observations. Dicklyon (talk) 04:24, 21 February 2023 (UTC)
Yes, I agree with Dicklyon. We should not slavishly follow boosterism-by-caps. If we capped everything that companies (and NASA and the military and many government agencies) cap, we'd be poking readers' eyes out. Tony (talk) 05:44, 21 February 2023 (UTC)
Tony, I like your metaphor (if that's what it is) of "poking readers' eyes out". That's pretty much the way I feel when I see the capped fragments in table cells, too (see section above). Some editors think caps make it look more "professional" or something. To me, they make it look more like the "poke your eyes out" 1999 web look. Dicklyon (talk) 09:12, 21 February 2023 (UTC)
Finals and Semifinals etc are common nouns. They might be preceded by an attributive noun phrase that is capitalised - in this case for example, "Eastern Conference". There is often a presumtion that a capitalised attributive phrase confers capitalisation in full. It doesn't. Unlike most other European languages that only capitalise proper names, English also capitalises for emphasis, significance and distinction - but WP doesn't per MOS:SIGNIFCAPS. Sometimes however, such phrases are consistently capitalised - and then, WP capitalises such phrases. The ngram evidence isn't telling us that though. Cinderella157 (talk) 10:59, 21 February 2023 (UTC)
Concur with Cinderella157, et al. We have clear evidence of major, mainstream sports news sources not capitalizing these, so we should not be doing it either.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  23:50, 23 February 2023 (UTC)
I'm with Cinderella too. MOSCAPS says that capping out there needs to be overwhelming for us to cap; which is in the same spirit as Chicago MOS and Hart's in the UK. Tony (talk) 12:34, 19 April 2023 (UTC)

Oppose: Given the three sub-discussions that have concluded or are about to conclude and in all of those discussions the consensus is clear that North American professional sports use these as proper nouns. The group of editors pushing this need to find a more constructive way to contribute to the site, as all this does is waste the time of productive editors on general nonsense. Deadman137 (talk) 18:16, 3 March 2023 (UTC)

The worst part is they're going to claim consensus here among their little circle and then go bulldoze discussions elsewhere claiming to be the sort of broader consensus described in WP:CONLIMITED when it's literally only four guys in an obscure talk page as opposed to the larger numbers disagreeing in the actual articles. oknazevad (talk) 21:25, 3 March 2023 (UTC)
Who is "they" and why are you bringing an us-versus-them WP:BATTLEGROUND attitude here?  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  13:57, 10 April 2023 (UTC)

Finals capping again

@Deadman137: who reverted me fixing some of these [1] [2], asserting "proper nouns". Given the lack of consensus on events with "Finals" and such in their names, can we at least agree that when used alone (e.g. "Lost in finals" or "Lost in final", also "semifinal", "preliminary round" etc.) they should not be capped, even in article where that "finals" signifies a capped version such as Stanley Cup Finals?

@Deadman137: If you just keep reverting (e.g. capping "Lost in Semi-Finals" this time) and not discussing, that's not going to converge, because I'll just fix it again. It's obviously not capped thus in books, so what are using to assert "Proper noun"? Dicklyon (talk) 02:28, 4 May 2023 (UTC)

We've had this conversation before and you've had this same conversation with many other editors and yet you continue to persist because you refuse to accept the arguments of other editors that disagree with you. Perhaps you should find something else to do around here that would be less disruptive and provide more value to project than this. Stop wasting people's time with your nonsense. Deadman137 (talk) 02:34, 4 May 2023 (UTC)
Other than the open discussion that this is a subsection of, I see a claim in 2020 that "NBA Finals" is a proper noun; so I'm not messing with that one. But for purely generic terms like "conference semi-finals" and "division finals", where we don't have conference or division as part of a larger name, I thought the results were pretty clear, but logically and by source usage (e.g. on this book search, 28 of the first 40 book hits use lowercase "the conference semi-final"). If you have a reason to assert that these are proper names, please do share the reason, rather than just say you've complained about it before. Dicklyon (talk) 04:10, 4 May 2023 (UTC)
You refer in the previous subsection above to discussions concluded or about to be concluded. Looking at Wikipedia_talk:Manual_of_Style/Capital_letters#Concluded, I find one "no-consensus" re Grand Final when part of a named event; I'm not touching anything like that. All the rest concluded lowercase. So I'm in the dark about what your complaint is. Dicklyon (talk) 04:15, 4 May 2023 (UTC)
I think what's wasting people's time is the edit-warring assertion that common nouns should be capitalized because they're proper nouns. A table-cell entry like "Lost in Preliminary Round" has no proper nouns and so the only uppercase letter should be the "L" at the beginning. — JohnFromPinckney (talk / edits) 09:56, 4 May 2023 (UTC)
I support this position. ~TPW 13:41, 28 August 2023 (UTC)
Words like finals and semifinals are basic English words in a standard dictionary. When used as standalone words, they make perfect sense lowercase, and there is no added meaning to the reader if they are capitalized.—Bagumba (talk) 10:24, 4 May 2023 (UTC)

@Sbaio: Another set of reverts now (e.g. this one and this one) with edit summary You have been told more than once to stop messing with official names. Not just Lost in Final, but even Lost in Final AHAC Challenge, a term that appears nowhere else on the web as far as I can find. He's not even claiming "proper nouns" or "proper names" – just "official names", which seems clearly irrelevant. Even if "Preliminary Round" is an official name, we don't cap that per MOS:CAPS, per long consensus and sources. Dicklyon (talk) 20:45, 4 May 2023 (UTC)

Why do you care so much about this? Is it hurting someone? Like if I turned in an essay using capital letters on Finals vs finals, I think my English teacher would understand the sports term vs a final series of something. The other thing here is, NHL editors are very keen on consistency. One change here needs to be made to all. Also, these articles are written in Canadian-English [3], which I'm not sure if there are additional nuances to be aware of. That being said, just make another RfC. It helps gain consensus from everyone. Conyo14 (talk) 21:49, 4 May 2023 (UTC)
We care about it because we want the encyclopedia to look good and use standard English as part of a professional presentation. Uppercasing common nouns and lowercasing proper nouns is non-standard and inhibits clarity and easy understanding. Your English teacher may be patient and permissive, but we have established a manual of style specifically to make it easy to produce a standard look, and mis-capitalizing random words runs counter to that. It's not just understanding what was meant, it's being able to parse it easily. — JohnFromPinckney (talk / edits) 23:28, 4 May 2023 (UTC)
We need consensus on this then, since it's not explicitly written as a rule. This statement from MOS:SPORTCAPS, "Specific competition titles and events (or series thereof) are capitalized if they are usually capitalized in independent sources: WPA World Nine-ball Championship, Tour de France, Americas Cup. Generic usage is not: a three-time world champion, international tournaments" will need to include "Ordered names of series such as 'First Round', 'Preliminary Round', or 'Semifinals' cannot be capitalized." Stanley Cup Finals will remain capitalized as it is the official and proper use of the name by the NHL and its sources, but use of the word Finals is a reference for Stanley Cup Finals in the context of an NHL article and I suppose that is more up to interpretation of the editors here. I, along with a few editors, successfully changed the round names from 2014–onward to be First Round, Second Round. etc. So, it can be done here regarding capitalization. RfC please. Conyo14 (talk) 00:00, 5 May 2023 (UTC)
Conyo, why do you care why I care? I don't care if you turn in an essay styled to your own preferences. But in WP, we have a manual of style. The interpretation seems pretty clear here. I'm struggling to think what question could be formulated and put to an RFC to clairify what has been clarified so many times already. Dicklyon (talk) 06:36, 5 May 2023 (UTC)
Where can I learn more about this changing of round names? Was it discussed some place? What was the motivation? Dicklyon (talk) 06:37, 5 May 2023 (UTC)
RfC in 2016 here: [4]. Interestingly, we mentioned the use of silly caps, but it was brushed aside as it was merely about the name change than the grammar associated with it. The main reason for the change was because the NHL changed it for its official Guide and Record Book in 2014 and then the site also changed it. By 2016, there were more hits around Google showing secondary sources also conformed to the change.
I see now, where you said "Capitalization of the round names, not including the preceding word (conference or first/second would stay capitalized), can be changed after the RfC is over, but this topic is merely the discussion of just the names, not the grammar." I thought you were saying it was decided to cap these terms; not the case. Dicklyon (talk) 04:35, 6 May 2023 (UTC)
FWIW, I care why you care because to me it's not an eyesore. In an RfC just state, "We need a consensus on whether the names of sports series when not used in a proper way are to be lowercase. We have some editors who are not conforming to MOSCAPS due to a misunderstanding of the vague rules on WP's MOS regarding capitalization in this case. All sports that do not have proper or official use of the series names in accordance to the primary source and/or a majority of secondary sources will therefore be decapitalized." If no consensus, editors will war, if consensus for change, no one will mess with this. I'll make sure to it. If consensus for no change, sorry bud. If the rules were more specific on this, I think we'd be better. Conyo14 (talk) 17:06, 5 May 2023 (UTC)
We have a manual of style. It has been developed over the years through consensus. Your RfC would effectively say: "Should we ignore the Manual of Style in the case of sports capitalization?" Many people believe that their area of work should have a different style because they like it that way or because the specialist sources they read follow a different style. We don't need to reach a consensus that the Manual of Style should apply in sports; we already have that consensus. SchreiberBike | ⌨ 21:21, 5 May 2023 (UTC)
Isn't it a guideline and not a set of laws? Also, is it written there was consensus on this? If there is, then there is no debate. Conyo14 (talk) 21:28, 5 May 2023 (UTC)
That's right, it's a guideline, not a set of laws. Nobody is going to be punished for getting capitalization wrong. And yes, the consensus has been written down in numerous move decisions over the years, just not precisely on "Preliminary Round" or "in the Semi-finals". Those terms are just like so many others; the RM on "Name <sport> tournament" seems most analogous. Look at discussions in the last couple of years under #Current for example. It's also written pretty clearly in MOS:CAPS (... only words and phrases that are consistently capitalized in a substantial majority of independent, reliable sources are capitalized in Wikipedia) and WP:NCCAPS (one should leave the second and subsequent words in lowercase unless the title phrase is a proper name that would always occur capitalized, even mid-sentence); note the "even mid sentence" – the caps you see at the top of event listing, in news headlines, etc. don't count toward this criterion. With few exceptions, there has been a strong consensus to follow this guidance. The exceptions have been in cases where large numbers of editors asserted their preference, in spite of evidence that the term is not usually capitalized in independent reliable sources. Dicklyon (talk) 23:57, 5 May 2023 (UTC)
Also, is it written there was consensus on this?: Which "this" are you specifically contesting? —Bagumba (talk) 01:03, 6 May 2023 (UTC)
I'd like to know where it is written in consensus whether semifinals, quarterfinals, etc. as a shorthand/reference to Stanley Cup Semifinals, Northeast Division Finals, Eastern Conference Quarterfinals, etc. should be lowercased when referenced. As far as I can tell, we have "no consensus" from a few months ago. So, yeah, it would be nice to reach a clear consensus. Not just editors saying "iT's rIgHt hErE iN MOSCAPS" (apologies for being facetious). Like where does it say that? It's all so vague and not specific enough for us. Please just do another RfC. End this war Dicklyon. Conyo14 (talk) 04:34, 6 May 2023 (UTC)
One reason we're having this discussion here is to hear from people who care about what MOSCAPS says, and how to interpret it. It seems that there's a clear consensus that it's clear enough on the guidance already, and there's no exception for shorthand phrases that are not consistently capped in sources. And even thing like "Stanley Cup semifinals" don't usually have capped Semifinals in sources so it's a real stretch to make such an excuse for capping semifinals. Dicklyon (talk) 04:40, 6 May 2023 (UTC)
I'm not arguing with you on this, because this is a stupid argument to have. You can probably relate being on the sense of reason. We hockey editors are so religious on keeping things consistent. An RfC will help strengthen everything though. Either that, or idk, maybe we pull a roll vote here with an additional week to officially, or properly, resolve this. You know if a majority of editors agree, then I mean, wow, all this fighting is over. Conyo14 (talk) 04:51, 6 May 2023 (UTC)
To be fair he's just mad that two of his proposals in the last year were not accepted. [5] [6]
He's just trying to force his viewpoint when others have decided to move on. In both conversations he also had to be reminded about WP:BLUDGEON. Deadman137 (talk) 21:23, 6 May 2023 (UTC)

In light of this discussion and time passed, I went ahead and restored the case corrections that were reverted, and a few more. But Deadman137 is reverted those again ([7], [8]); is there more to say abuot them? Are these terms (Quarterfinals, Preliminary Round, Division Semifinals) claimed to be proper names? Any support for that? Dicklyon (talk) 00:32, 6 May 2023 (UTC)

The edit summary says Stanley Cup Quarterfinals are an official round name. It might be, as a full phrase (but that's a separate matter). But the capitalization in question is for the standalone word quarterfinals. In this case, there is no difference in meaning for the reader if it is capitalized. —Bagumba (talk) 01:29, 6 May 2023 (UTC)
If all it takes to resolve this just removing the hockey shorthand, we could consider that request. The terms Stanley Cup Semifinals and Quarterfinals date back to the 1920s and were used in some form or another until 1981 and one of the terms was brought back once for use in 2021. The Division rounds from 1982–1993 can also be expanded to their proper name as well.
Dicklyon I'm surprised that your actions haven't earned you some type of block at this point. I thought that it was a fairly serious policy violation to use a bot to add your preferred edit into multiple articles when you're involved in an active content dispute, some might even call that edit warring. I will remind you that Wikipedia does not have a strict time limit on how quickly a person is required to respond to you. A day or two is acceptable as some people are busy outside of this site. Deadman137 (talk) 02:56, 6 May 2023 (UTC)
I'm not using a bot, and not doing high-speed editing of anything controversial. We haven't heard anything here to suggest that these terms are proper names (even if there are some proper names that contain words like Finals and Semifinals and Division Finals, those aren't what I'm editing). Even re "Stanley Cup Quarterfinals", book don't cap that. Dicklyon (talk) 03:51, 6 May 2023 (UTC)
If all it takes to resolve this just removing the hockey shorthand, we could consider that request: I'm not a hockey editor. However, as an active editor in other sports, I don't see the advantage of being repetitively verbose and prefixing Stanley Cup. —Bagumba (talk) 04:04, 6 May 2023 (UTC)

@Deadman137: So far your comments above amount to nothing but personal attacks on me. And nobody is supporting your notion (expressed in edit summaries, not claimed or backed up here) that these words are proper nouns, or proper names. There's a pretty obvious consensus that this is a run-of-the-mill application of MOS:CAPS. So can we just fix them and move on? Dicklyon (talk) 06:30, 6 May 2023 (UTC)

More evidence

MOS:CAPS starts with "Wikipedia avoids unnecessary capitalization." Caps are unnecessary if a number of independent reliable sources avoid them. Examples of sources/outlets that have styles similar to ours, i.e. that cap proper names but do not cap things like "semifinals" in ... include:

The fact that lots of other sites would use "Conference semi-finals", "Conference Semi-finals", "conference Semi-finals", or even "Conference Semi-Finals" is not relevant to how we conform to Wikipedia style. Dicklyon (talk) 06:25, 6 May 2023 (UTC)

Let me start by apologizing to Dicklyon, you're right you did not use a bot to engage in your edit war, you used a wikipedia gadget and I have the receipts to prove it. Also holding someone accountable for their actions is not a personal attack. You know that in this case that these terms are used as proper nouns and you've known that for about a year now. Your sources are so good that we cannot determine who actually wrote two of your sources and the other two are local beat writers that are not considered to be experts in their field.
As oknazevad noted in this thread, this overarching policy of yours is WP:CONLIMITED. You've tried get your changes with North American sports through many times and you've not gained consensus at any point. As Randy Kryn noted in opposition: "per the decisions at the recent baseball RMs which kept the uppercasing of their end-of-season playoff schedules. That, along with the uppercasing of NFL conference championship games, seems to have set the style for consistent Wikipedia casing of North American high-level professional sport playoffs. Besides that, the discussion indicates that there is nothing broken here." Given that you do not have consensus the only thing that we can use is the edited consensus and that does not agree with your stance.
As Bagumba said in this thread: "But the capitalization in question is for the standalone word quarterfinals. In this case, there is no difference in meaning for the reader if it is capitalized." The problem with this argument is that you can argue the opposite as well and it is just as valid, "this part of the heading isn't capitalized, we should capitalize it as there is no difference in meaning to the reader." This flawed rule of yours could not be a better argument in support of WP:IAR than I've ever seen on this site. Also of concern is that during the process of coming up with this idea, it was decided to limit qualified sources to only independent ones as the only things that could refute your arguments, this generally is not supported by the community as primary sources are perfectly acceptable under the accepted standards of this site.
So to resolve this issue and end all the fighting we should rescind the current horribly flawed and under scrutinized rule and replace it with a reasonable argument made by GoodDay in 2020: "May not settle with many here, but perhaps a compromise is required. Leave those that are capitalised, as they are & leave those that aren't capitalised, as they are." So to take this just a little further, if a company or league capitalizes any names of their event, we do the same, if they do not capitalize, we do not capitalize. This is likely the only reasonable compromise that we'll be able to come to as what is currently in use is just going to cause further conflict. Deadman137 (talk) 02:10, 8 May 2023 (UTC)
"Leave those that are capitalised, as they are & leave those that aren't capitalised, as they are". Wowsers, I sometimes forget, just how logical I can be :) GoodDay (talk) 02:23, 8 May 2023 (UTC)
Have you taken this to the idea lab? Nemov (talk) 03:36, 8 May 2023 (UTC)
The problem with this argument is that you can argue the opposite as well and it is just as valid, 'this part of the heading isn't capitalized, we should capitalize it as there is no difference in meaning to the reader': This is contrary to MOS:CAPS, which begins:

Wikipedia avoids unnecessary capitalization

Also of concern...it was decided to limit qualified sources to only independent ones as the only things that could refute your arguments, this generally is not supported by the community...: The use of independent sources is also per MOS:CAPS (emphasis added):

Wikipedia relies on sources to determine what is conventionally capitalized; only words and phrases that are consistently capitalized in a substantial majority of independent, reliable sources are capitalized in Wikipedia.

—Bagumba (talk) 04:17, 8 May 2023 (UTC)
We could rewrite MOS:CAPS not just for sport events, but for capitalization of important topics of all sorts, as "Wikipedia embraces unnecessary capitalization. In English, capitalization is often used for emphasis of important terms. Wikipedia relies on sources to determine what might be capitalized; any words and phrases that are sometimes capitalized by promoters of a topic are important enough to be capitalized in Wikipedia." That would keep us busy for a while, putting all the caps back into the sports articles, the bird and plant names, and the all the rest. Dicklyon (talk) 10:41, 8 May 2023 (UTC)
Except, that's not actually what Wikipedia does. Just because people disagree with your particular approach doesn't mean that there are no standards, or that they aren't applied. --Jayron32 13:11, 8 May 2023 (UTC)
This is our time to determine what Wikipedia should do. What it currently does is the mess we're trying to solve. O.N.R. (talk) 01:42, 10 May 2023 (UTC)
Conyo wrote above, "NHL editors are very keen on consistency". Consistency is good. And the best way to get there, when things are inconsistent, is to move in the direction indicated by guidelines, especially those of very longstanding consensus about what we should do. For example, if you search for "Preliminary Round" in WP (using regular expression search), you'll find is less than a tenth of the use of lowercase "preliminary round"; the capped version is not all concentrated in hockey, and hockey has never been anywhere near consistent on this internally. So I've been moving toward consistency, per the guideline. What would you propose instead that could be less of "mess"? Why not just help? Dicklyon (talk) 22:17, 10 May 2023 (UTC)
The NHL's "preliminary round" only existed for around a decade 40-odd years ago, so it may not be a good sign of usage for the modern-day rounds. O.N.R. (talk) 00:40, 11 May 2023 (UTC)
Let me know if there's some other kind of round you'd like me to check. Dicklyon (talk) 03:37, 11 May 2023 (UTC)
If we're limited to NHL, the obvious option would be the conference finals. Is it "Eastern Conference Final(s)" or "Eastern Conference final(s)" in a hockey context? O.N.R. (talk) 17:09, 11 May 2023 (UTC)
I think we're accepting that it would be "Eastern Conference Final(s)" as the proper name of that event, like "Stanley Cup Finals". That's not one we've argued about. But "the conference finals" when the conference is not named, like in books. In Wikipedia, I count 230 articles with "the Conference Final" (optional s after that) and 160 with "the conference final" (plus 27 "the Conference final") so really not many in total and pretty well mixed. Dicklyon (talk) 18:23, 11 May 2023 (UTC)
Per Dicklyon, there's a difference between Eastern Conference Finals, which is a proper name for the event, and merely "conference finals", which is a generic noun phrase. In the context of, say, the NBA, the Eastern Conference Finals are the proper name of a specific event, whereas "conference finals" is a generic term that can refer to any number of conference finals, like the difference between "King Charles III" (a specific king, for which the title is considered part of the proper name) and "king of the United Kingdom", a generic noun referring to any of a number of such kings. --Jayron32 18:30, 11 May 2023 (UTC)
It's not a given to me that "Finals" should be obviously capitalized: The Tampa Bay Lightning entered their Eastern Conference finals matchup against the New York Rangers after a well-executed sweep of the Florida Panthers and as a well-rested team, getting nine days off between series. (ESPN) A reader won't interpret the meaning any differently if it was finals vs. Finals.—Bagumba (talk) 10:44, 12 May 2023 (UTC)
My language "I think we're accepting that it would be 'Eastern Conference Final(s)'" was carefully chosen to allow that I also don't think it's a given. Particularly in examples like yours where I'd interpret "Eastern Conference" as modifying "finals matchup". If you said "the Eastern Conference Finals was held ..." then maybe the caps are appropriate. I'd want to check sources. My point here is just that that's not the subtle question being argued, where even "conference finals" has got pushback from a couple of editors, particularly Deadman137. Dicklyon (talk) 16:35, 12 May 2023 (UTC)
Looking more at sources, I'm more inclined to question those. In book stats, "Eastern Conference semifinals" in more common than "Eastern Conference Semifinals" except in a couple of recent years, likely influenced by Wikipedia's capitalization. Same with final and quarterfinals and Western. Dicklyon (talk) 02:39, 14 May 2023 (UTC)

And again

@Deadman137: Another revert today claiming "still no consensus", capping "the Qualifying Round" and "the First Round". Have I read this wrong? I thought we had pretty clear consensus above, with Deadman137 pretty much alone in his objections, and still not saying exactly what his objection is or why. Plus the cited sources there use "the qualification round" and "the first round", so it's hard to see what he's getting at. Dicklyon (talk) 18:12, 11 May 2023 (UTC)

@Dicklyon: You may want to go to WT:HOCKEY#Round_names_capitalization, as the editors are discussing a potential t-ban. I'd rather we didn't go there, so I'll just open an RfC there. I'd rather we not have an edit war of this magnitude over something so silly (pun intended). Conyo14 (talk) 02:42, 12 May 2023 (UTC)
Yes, it seems totally inappropriate that a thread for notifying about this discussion forked into its own hockey-fan-centric discussion with explicit canvassing, but there it is. Dicklyon (talk) 03:27, 12 May 2023 (UTC)
Hey, we support Caps fans ;). But this does affect all of WP:HOCKEY, so let's involve more editors than MOS and hockey. Okay? Okay. Conyo14 (talk) 03:32, 12 May 2023 (UTC)
I see you have indeed launched an RfC at the forked discussion at the WikiProject: WT:WikiProject Ice Hockey#RfC: NHL round names capitalization. I suppose I better ping all the respondents here to go there now? Post it more centrally, too? Dicklyon (talk) 03:36, 12 May 2023 (UTC)
The RfC will ping random editors within 24 hours, but yes, please bring everyone and post centrally. Conyo14 (talk) 03:55, 12 May 2023 (UTC)
I listed it at Wikipedia_talk:Manual_of_Style/Capital_letters#Current. We should ping previous disccussants, too, But I'm pretty pooped right now, having flown from SYD to SFO today (a very long Thursday). Dicklyon (talk) 04:17, 12 May 2023 (UTC)

Some of the gist of the rationale to (arguably) support the capping of Final (and similar) in sentences and sentence fragments like Lost in Final is that Final is being used as a shortened form of a full name (eg Stanley Cup Final). The argument would continue, that there is no evidence of the broader community having reached a consensus on this particular matter; therefore, there is a need to arrive at a consensus on this. Please see Use of capitals in a shortened title, where this very matter was discussed. There was clearly consensus against this being a case where capitalisation would be permitted. Cinderella157 (talk) 03:35, 1 June 2023 (UTC)

Thanks for finding that from 2015. Also note that even in the full term Stanley Cup Final, "final" was most often lowercase until a few years ago; same with plural Finals; this shift was likely influenced by Wikipedia capping it since 2007. Dicklyon (talk) 05:02, 1 June 2023 (UTC)
Final in Stanley Cup F|final is a descriptive noun. There is no reasonable reason capping it is "necessary" per MOS:CAPS. I was not arguing it was. I was only speaking to the capitalisation of shortened forms of a full name which is presumed to be a proper name (ie capped in full). :) Cinderella157 (talk) 08:54, 1 June 2023 (UTC)
No doubt that some sources who use Stanley Cup Finals, NBA Finals, etc. might also refer to the series with a standalone capitalized Finals. But what is gained over lowercase finals, if the context is clear which series is being referred to? For example, this New York Times source uses standalone lowercase finals and conference finals in an NBA article.—Bagumba (talk) 09:28, 1 June 2023 (UTC)

Another one

At User_talk:PeeJay#Wrong_how? we're discussing "FA Cup third round" vs "FA Cup Third Round" and such.

Here's the item in question: They needed three games to defeat Queens Park Rangers in the FA Cup Third Round, before hitting four past Oxford United in the next round.

@PeeJay: let's see if we can get more eyes on this question; I already it fixed it back to lowercase, but you're still saying that's wrong and capped it again. Dicklyon (talk) 14:09, 27 May 2023 (UTC)

Go the RFC route. Gets more editors involved & ends the content dispute, one way or the other. GoodDay (talk) 14:35, 27 May 2023 (UTC)
I don't think we need a new RFC every time an editor doesn't understand MOSCAPS, do you? Dicklyon (talk) 14:52, 27 May 2023 (UTC)
It's best to have one, as RFCs tend to solidify consensus. GoodDay (talk) 15:21, 27 May 2023 (UTC)
So far it's just one guy who doesn't understand MOSCAPS. If someone wants to make a case that this is a proper name, or that for some other reason it should be capitalized, let them say so and we'll see if we have clear consensus. It's hard to me to imagine who would still think it's not clear, after all the discussion at hockey and elsewhere. Dicklyon (talk) 17:27, 27 May 2023 (UTC)
Well, I reckon it's up to @PeeJay:, which route he chooses :) GoodDay (talk) 21:36, 27 May 2023 (UTC)
I'm not making a case for the round names in any competition other than the FA Cup. If other competitions don't capitalise, that's fine, but we have to go with what the evidence supports on a case-by-case basis. In both the competition regulations and the competition calendar, the rounds are capitalised. I can't explain why some pages on the FA website don't capitalise, but the regulations supersede random news articles. – PeeJay 13:05, 28 May 2023 (UTC)
That calendar doesn't have sentences. The rules include sentences such as "The Clubs competing in each Round of the Competition shall be drawn in couples..." This does not mean the WP should cap "Clubs" and "Round" and "Competition". Their style is to cap what's important to them, for emphasis. Our style manual says we don't do that. I'll go ahead and fix it again, given the lack of any good reason for capping. Dicklyon (talk) 15:31, 28 May 2023 (UTC)
Or you could wait until the end of the discussion… you've made a pretty big assumption regarding the FA's motives for capitalisation. – PeeJay 15:48, 28 May 2023 (UTC)
Your response indicates a clear lack of understanding of MOS:CAPS. The provision only words and phrases that are consistently capitalized in a substantial majority of independent, reliable sources are capitalized in Wikipedia is specifically to not put weight on "official" docs, where being too close to the subject means they're likely to be capitalizing for emphasis (at the FA do in the rules you linked for lots of other common nouns). Read it through, look at some of the precedents collected at the top of WT:MOSCAPS, and see if you don't agree. Dicklyon (talk) 15:41, 28 May 2023 (UTC)
Re my "big assumption regarding the FA's motives", you're right, I shouldn't try to make such inferences. My point rather is that their capitalization of "Club", "Round", "Competition", "Players", "Commercial Contracts", "Copyright Materials", etc., shows that they are not using a style in which capitalization is reserved for proper names, and therefore you can't infer from that doc that they treat anything capitalized in it as proper names. Since they often use lowercase for the round names in most other docs on their official site, the evidence is clear that even thefa.com does not support your interpretation. Dicklyon (talk) 19:56, 28 May 2023 (UTC)
Use lower-case, per all these other discussions. It's been observed many times that wikiproject-based fans of particular subjects (mostly sports, like football and hockey and tennis) work themselves up into a state of "discouragement" when they go the route of protracted squabbling to maintain their "capitalize this because we think it's important" bad habit. RfC after RfC about the same thing is the primary source of this, and is a general drain on editorial productivity. The WP:RFC process should be used for settling genuinely controversial matters involving a large number of editors to get to a consensus; not by one won't-drop-the-stick editor to delay the inevitable.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  20:56, 27 May 2023 (UTC)
Yes, it could be a case of boosterism, such as organisations that cap job titles (Garbage Collector Grade 2). Our readers will find it so much easier to distinguish the proper name (FA Cup) from whichever round it is: ""FA Cup third round". "FA Cup Third Round" pokes my eyes four times and lacks the distinction. There is utterly no need for an RfC. Tony (talk) 08:20, 28 May 2023 (UTC)

More case fix reverts

@SounderBruce: who reverted about 17 of my last 1000 or so sports case-fixing edits, for reasons that remain unclear. See User talk:SounderBruce#Capitalization reverts. He suggests another RFC, but hasn't said what the question is. Looks like mostly hockey round names, which we just re-settled with an RFC. Dicklyon (talk) 03:16, 9 June 2023 (UTC)

@SounderBruce: let us know if you need time to explain, before I restore my case fixes. Dicklyon (talk) 00:53, 10 June 2023 (UTC)

Lacking any response from him as he edits other things and ignores the pings, and in light of the recent RFC at WT:WikiProject Ice Hockey#RfC: NHL round names capitalization, I'll go ahead and re-do those fixes that SounderBruce reverted. Dicklyon (talk) 03:24, 11 June 2023 (UTC)

I checked out of this discussion a while ago. It isn't logical to use a hockey decision to decide how soccer terms are used. If you must continue being an annoyance to editors who are here to create content and not squabble over whether words should be capitalized based on whether 49.9999% of a selected number of sources use which form, I just ask that you do things with more care and consistency. Mass JWB-ing without care is hurting the project. SounderBruce 03:39, 11 June 2023 (UTC)
The failure of the hockey exception suggested that other sport exceptions would also not be in order. If I make mistakes in my edits, it would be useful if you would point them out instead of just reverting. I still have no clue what you're objecting to. I see you're mass reverting again, but have still not pointed out what I got wrong, if anything. Dicklyon (talk) 04:04, 11 June 2023 (UTC)
@SounderBruce: Wikipedia has had a style of avoiding unnecessary capitalization for longer than I've been around (over 15 years). It's not a real big deal like WP:NPOV or WP:V, but it's something worth attending to for people who enjoy such things. When someone writes "It isn't logical to use a hockey decision to decide how soccer terms are used", it's clear that there's a misunderstanding. The style decisions were made long ago and the vast majority of the encyclopedia follows them. They still sometimes surprise people who are unaware of them, but re-litigating them every time is not productive. Like many others (including me), @Dicklyon is doing the boring but satisfying work of making the encyclopedia use a consistent style throughout. It's gnome work, not for glory or barnstars, but it makes the encyclopedia better. SchreiberBike | ⌨  20:31, 11 June 2023 (UTC)
With SounderBruce being a lone voice against what appears to still be a solid consensus, can I go ahead and re-fix those he reverted? Dicklyon (talk) 17:42, 13 June 2023 (UTC)
Not a peep about this at several FACs about American soccer in the past few years, where MOS compliance is actually checked carefully. I'm opposed to any actions that are not discussed with the wider community with input from editors who actually have some subject knowledge, rather than simply using the ever-worsening search abilities of Google. SounderBruce 05:26, 14 June 2023 (UTC)
Maybe invite someone from WT:MOSCAPS to check next time. Dicklyon (talk) 02:38, 15 June 2023 (UTC)
Actually, there was a peep, but you squashed it by asserting they are proper names. Dicklyon (talk) 02:47, 15 June 2023 (UTC)
Also note that near the top of this talk section I asked you Where can I find more about your interpretation that "MLS's playoff rounds are given proper names"? You didn't answer. Dicklyon (talk) 02:50, 15 June 2023 (UTC)

His reverts' edit summary (MLS round names are proper names) e.g. here is just like what a couple of ice hockey editors were claiming for their sport. A perusal of sources does not support this; e.g. for "MLS Cup playoffs", it's easy to find lots of uses in reliable independent sources with lowercase "playoffs". For round names in isolation, even more so. It's not clear what SounderBruce means when he asks me to "do things with more care and consistency"; consistency takes time and he's just interfering by random reverts. And if more care is needed, I could use an example or two of where I got it wrong (I do make mistakes now and then, but I own them and try to fix them quickly). Dicklyon (talk) 21:34, 11 June 2023 (UTC)

I also did a handful of page moves to downcase "playoffs", thinking those would be uncontroversial as they seemed to be in lots of other sports I had worked on in the last year, but SounderBruce moved them back (e.g. here) with edit summary "Proper name of the tournament". So I suppose we need a multi RM discussion now, which will be another numbers game of soccer fans/promoters versus people who prefer to follow WP guidelines. Dicklyon (talk) 21:41, 11 June 2023 (UTC)

Year NHL playoffs

FWIW, I've attempted to implement the recent WP:HOCKEY RFC decision, at the (ya gotta start somewhere) 2023 Stanley Cup playoffs page. Don't know if I got it correct. Feel free to look it over. GoodDay (talk) 21:55, 11 June 2023 (UTC)

Thanks for doing that. I did a few more there; and still more. Sometimes it seems it will never end. Dicklyon (talk) 04:35, 12 June 2023 (UTC)

In biographies, when to capitalize the name of an academic major or a department

Much of the above discussion takes a university's view of capitalization because they are the ones making up names for all these branches (schools, colleges, faculties, departments, divisions, institutes, laboratories, etc.), and some WP editors work for a university or have spent a lot of time at them, but I have read WP:SSF, so I go more by how they are capitalized (or not) by dictionaries, encyclopedias and newspapers. The Washington Post seldom capitalizes department names at universities. I knock them down ("she joined the mechanical engineering department at Pompous University"). The degree "Bachelor of Science" is capitalized in dictionaries because it is the name of a particular degree or a person with that degree, not just descriptive (not "an unmarried man wearing a lab coat"). When a source says a person has a "Bachelor of Science in Computer Science", can we be sure that the person was in some fancy "Computer Science program" or did they just study computer science (common noun) well enough to receive a degree? Lower case seems the most sensible for "computer science" in this case, so I knock it down. You could say "Smith struggled with Computer Science 101 but did better in Computer Science 102", as these are obviously course names and proper names. Does the MoS need one set of guidance for biographies and another set for universities? Chris the speller yack 21:41, 10 August 2023 (UTC)

No, the same conventions should apply to both. Per the discussion immediately above, we capitalize proper nouns: names of degree programs (academic majors) and names of departments, faculties, or schools. We lowercase names of fields. I undid an edit you made today on Morton Gurtin because the two names in question were clearly written as names of departments, not names of fields, so they should not have been lowercased. You can tell because the context of one of them was as the publisher of a reference (always a department rather than a field; a field is not the kind of thing that can be a publisher), and because they are phrases containing the word "department". One of them turns out to be an incorrect department name (it is about a former "Mechanical Engineering Department", a name that can be seen within the linked document about the department's history, but by the time the reference was published the name had been changed to "Mechanical, Aerospace, and Nuclear Engineering Department") and that should be corrected, but that does not change the fact that the intent was, very obviously, to refer to a department and not to a field. You would not lowercase "General Motors" despite the fact that its name consists of common English words and is descriptive of its business; I don't see why you think academic rather than business organizations should be treated any differently. —David Eppstein (talk) 22:41, 10 August 2023 (UTC)
Yes. "Mechanical Engineering Department" should be uppercased, just as "Department of Transportation" is. XOR'easter (talk) 01:19, 11 August 2023 (UTC)
The reason you don't see why I think that is that I don't think that. If a business has a marketing department, it should not be upper-cased. If you search site:latimes.com for "mathematics department", you will see that almost all are in lower case. The phrase "mechanical engineering department" is descriptive, not a proper name; many universities have one, and if a university doesn't have one today, it can create one tomorrow. This is different from a proper name like "McDonough School of Business", but in "the law school at Pompous University", "school" is a common noun and "law" simply clarifies its purpose. That's not a proper name. Chris the speller yack 03:29, 11 August 2023 (UTC)
In California, there is one Department of Transportation, but probably many mechanical engineering departments in many universities and colleges. Apples and Oranges. Chris the speller yack 03:32, 11 August 2023 (UTC)
But there isn't more than one such department per school, and California's DoT isn't lower-cased just because other states have them too. The word "department" is a common noun, and "of transportation" clarifies its purpose, but put them together and you get the name for a specific organization. XOR'easter (talk) 15:51, 11 August 2023 (UTC)
Can we draw a distinction between say “mechanical engineering department” (a description) vs “Department of Mechanical Engineering” (a proper name)? Blueboar (talk) 16:08, 11 August 2023 (UTC)
The word "board" is a common noun, and "of directors" clarifies its makeup, but please don't tell me you would upper-case them in "... the company's board of directors voted to ..." or any other phrase just because it is a compound noun. We capitalize "Department of Transportation" because government agencies tend to be treated differently. Per MOS:INSTITUTIONS, "only words and phrases that are consistently capitalized in a substantial majority of independent, reliable sources are capitalized in Wikipedia.", and I would say that most departments of transportation fit that. Chris the speller yack 16:13, 11 August 2023 (UTC)
MOS:INSTITUTIONS begins, Full names of institutions, organizations, companies, etc. (United States Department of State) are proper names and require capitals. A department within a university is an organization, not a feature of an organization; one generally wouldn't capitalize "board of directors" when talking about a company, but the analogy to a university department isn't the board of directors, it's the company. XOR'easter (talk) 17:37, 11 August 2023 (UTC)
The third sentence of MOS:CAPS says "Wikipedia relies on sources to determine what is conventionally capitalized; only words and phrases that are consistently capitalized in a substantial majority of independent, reliable sources are capitalized in Wikipedia". Neither nytimes.com nor washingtonpost.com nor latimes.com consistently capitalizes names of departments at universities; how much effort should we put into trying to concoct a way to circumvent the very clear guidance? Chris the speller yack 19:11, 11 August 2023 (UTC)
Nothing is being circumvented. We're just following the example of Inside Higher Ed: “We’ve become so dependent on things like Zoom and that dependence allows them to change things without consulting its users,” said Sukrit Venkatagiri, assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science at Swarthmore College. [9] Or In 2019, the chair of Virginia Commonwealth University’s Department of African American Studies asked a panel of four Virginia college and university presidents whether their institutions required a course on race and racism. [10] Or Hart Blanton, who heads the university’s Department of Communication and Journalism [11]. And the Associated Press: Moments earlier, Fedewa and Jim Schneider with the university’s Department of Fisheries and Wildlife journeyed up to the roof to retrieve the chicks despite their parents — Freyja and Apollo — angrily screeching and hovering above [12]. XOR'easter (talk) 21:41, 11 August 2023 (UTC)
Note especially in the final example above "the university's" is lowercase (because it uses university as a word, not a name, even though there is clearly one specific university in mind) but the name of the department within it is properly capitalized. —David Eppstein (talk) 01:58, 12 August 2023 (UTC)
From apnews.com: "said Keith Howard, a professor at the department of music and center of Korean studies at the University of London", also "He later was chairman of the department of music at Cleveland State University", and "Guest conductor for the group will be Rollo A. Dilworth, professor of choral music education and chair of the department of music education ..." so they don't consistently capitalize department names. I agree that insidehighered.com does capitalize them, but they also consistently capitalize "board of regents", so I wonder how independent of the universities they really are. Chris the speller yack 04:08, 12 August 2023 (UTC)
You think that people who follow a consistent spelling convention could only do so if they are in the pocket of Evil Big Education? What a strange world-view. Please don't let it color your Wikipedia editing. —David Eppstein (talk) 04:41, 12 August 2023 (UTC)
Maybe not in the pocket of, but in very close association with. The MoS says "substantial majority of independent, reliable sources"; a single source that's very close to the universities is still a long way from a "substantial majority". Chris the speller yack 13:48, 12 August 2023 (UTC)
Please stop applying your fringe views of independence to Wikipedia. It is seriously distorting your edits, as evidenced here. If you cannot be rational about these things you need to find something else to do. —David Eppstein (talk) 17:19, 12 August 2023 (UTC)
It's just one source, nothing like not a substantial majority of sources. And please adjust your tone. I am not irrational, and have not accused those who cannot follow straightforward MoS guidance of being irrational. Most reliable sources do not consistently capitalize names of departments at universities. I have checked. If you investigate and find that a substantial majority of independent, reliable sources consistently capitalize department names, then show me your findings and we will compare. I see no need for WP to capitalize more than most newspapers. Chris the speller yack 19:07, 13 August 2023 (UTC)
Is there at least agreement that "physics" in "his B.S. in physics" should not be uppper-cased in a bio? I checked for "his B.A. in music/Music" (because I haven't been titling the scale by changing a lot of those), and two-thirds were in lower case. It should be one or the other. I think the MoS could use a section indicating that changing to upper case should not be done. If there is consensus I'll add one. Chris the speller yack 19:30, 13 August 2023 (UTC)
I don't necessarily have a problem with "B.S in physics"–since the formal name of the program/major might not have actually been "Physics". Let me give you an example. Some Australian universities have two different physics majors, "Physics" and "Advanced Physics" (aka "Physics (Advanced)"). The "Physics" major is intended for your average student; the "Advanced Physics" major is an accelerated course intended for the top performers, and it is much more fast-paced, covering advanced material much earlier in the degree than the standard physics major does. Suppose someone graduates from the Advanced Physics major. It might be technically correct to say they have a "Bachelor of Science in Advanced Physics" or "Bachelor of Science in Physics (Advanced)" (I think in practice they often put the advanced bit in the degree name rather than major name, so I think it is most often actually "Bachelor of Advanced Science in Physics" or "Bachelor of Advanced Science (Physics)".) However, for a biography, one might consider the specific physics major they graduated in too much detail, so one might just say "they have a Bachelor of Science in physics". And in that sentence, the "in physics" is correctly lowercased, since it is not the formal name of their major, it is just the name of the academic discipline it is in. But, conversely, it would also be correct to say "they have a Bachelor of Science in Advanced Physics" (or whatever the precise formal title of the degree and major is)–that is just adding more information. However, I think something like "they have a Bachelor of Science in advanced physics" would be incorrect, since it is keeping the formal name of the major but wrongly lowercasing it. Coming to "Bachelor of Science in physics" versus "Bachelor of Science in Physics" – the first is always correct, the second is only correct if that is actually the precise formal title of their major/program. If you aren't sure, I'd go with the first; but, if you have a citation to demonstrate the second, I don't see the problem with the second, and indeed I'm not sure why we should replace the second by the first in that case–except possibly for the argument I made at the start, that the specific major they did is too much information. However, with this specific example, I think the fact they were such a good student they did a special major for advanced students probably actually is relevant biographical information, so the argument that it is too much information is dubious. SomethingForDeletion (talk) 01:42, 14 August 2023 (UTC)
To my American ear, to have a B.S. in physics is to say that you have a degree in the field of study of physics. To have a B.S. in advanced physics implies that the field of study of advanced physics is a different field from physics. If instead one said that they had a B.S. from the University of Something through their accelerated undergraduate Advanced Physics program, then it would be clear that Advanced Physics is a proper noun, the name of a program. Again, good writing can make clear the difference between a field of study and a named program. SchreiberBike | ⌨  13:24, 14 August 2023 (UTC)
I agree "through their accelerated undergraduate Advanced Physics program" makes it clearer. And I agree that "B.S. in advanced physics" makes it wrongly sound like "advanced physics is a different field from physics". But would you think the same if you saw it in title case, e.g. "B.S. in Advanced Physics"? To me, the title case makes clear it is a proper noun, and hence is the name of a program/major, not a discipline. SomethingForDeletion (talk) 14:01, 14 August 2023 (UTC)
In a perfect world, yes, but I see fields of study capitalized so often that I tend to assume it was written by someone unfamiliar with Wikipedia's style. At that point I could do further research to find out if there is a program with that name at that institution, but usually I don't. If the sentence were written more clearly then I'd know right away.  SchreiberBike | ⌨  15:02, 14 August 2023 (UTC)
@Chris the speller: The MoS says "substantial majority of independent, reliable sources"; a single source that's very close to the universities is still a long way from a "substantial majority" I think you misunderstand the purpose of Wikipedia's requirement for independent sources. The point of it is, if we consider a single institution (like a single company or a single university), obviously anything it publishes about itself is likely to be biased in its favour, exaggerate its own importance–so it is proper we take non-independent sources with a grain of salt. But, it was never meant to apply to entire sectors of society, such as the higher education sector as a whole, or an entire industry, or so on. Saying a newspaper/magazine which focuses on the higher education sector is not an independent source for information about the higher education sector is to misunderstand what the requirement for independent sources is all about. How is your argument different from saying that we should consider an academic chemistry journal as a "non-independent" source for proper chemical nomenclature, because the chemistry journal lacks independence from the academic discipline of chemistry? That argument seems rather obviously silly, but how is yours really any different? SomethingForDeletion (talk) 01:55, 14 August 2023 (UTC)
Please read WP:SSF – "how to capitalize, italicize, hyphenate, ... Specialized works are notoriously unreliable for this purpose, because in a great many fields they tend to reflect conventions for specialized publications that widely depart from grammatical and style rules of everyday English". It is obvious that insidehighered.com is such a specialized work, so we cannot prefer its styling to that of dictionaries, newspapers and other encyclopedias. Chris the speller yack 14:28, 14 August 2023 (UTC)
The Editors of the Encyclopaedia Britannica agree with InsideHigherEd, at least when it comes to specific classes/courses (of which programs/majors are a type): "Names of specific classes or courses are proper nouns... When you are naming a specific class or course, such as Science 241 or Math 100, always capitalize it. Capitalize course titles such as "History of the United States" and "Elementary Physics."". If that's their style with respect to programs/majors, I don't see why that wouldn't do the same for the names of academic departments. Indeed, sometimes they do, see this sentence in their article Paul W. Taylor: "He spent the remainder of his career (1950–90) as a faculty member in the Department of Philosophy at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York". Or see also the Kids Britannica article on the University of California, which under the heading "University of California at Irvine" says: "Its Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences awards both graduate and undergraduate degrees". Although I note their style is inconsistent, and there are other articles in which they refer to academic departments in all lower case. However, the very fact that a generalist encyclopaedia does this is evidence against your argument. SomethingForDeletion (talk) 03:32, 22 August 2023 (UTC)
I would capitalize Boston University Department of Mechanical Engineering because it's a proper noun, but department of mechanical engineering is not. ~TPW 14:41, 24 August 2023 (UTC)
Yes. Same goes for "is a professor of mechanical engineering", "has a degree in mechanical engineering", etc.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  04:54, 28 August 2023 (UTC)
I think there is a distinction between "is a professor of mechanical engineering" and "is Professor of Mechanical Engineering". The second is a formal title, hence a proper noun; the first is just a description of their job. The second is only correct if that's their actual formal title, and would be arguably wrong if it were actually "Rich Benefactor Distinguished Professor of Mechanical and Mechatronic Engineering"; whereas, the first could be correct even in this latter case. SomethingForDeletion (talk) 06:48, 28 August 2023 (UTC)
For WP purposes, there is no difference because of MOS:JOBTITLES. We don't capitalize job titles or anything like them just because they're "formal titles", i.e. the actual names of the positions versus descriptive phrases for them (when those even differ at all). The nominal exception is when they're attached directly to the names as if part of the names ("Professor Stevens", "Professor of Anthropology Dorothy M. Stevens"). But we generally do not use that style at all for professors (versus, say, presidents of countries), and we decreasingly capitalize such things even when attached to names if they are "commercial" or everday. So even that distinction is mostly moot. The only case I can think of for capitalizing a professorial title by itself is when it is a named-endownment chair, e.g. "was appointed the Alfred Fitler Moore Professor of Telecommunication Systems at the University of Pennsylvania", because it's basically a professional award in addition to a job title/role. And same does go for roles; it's "department head", not "Department Head". [The article I lifted that named-endowment chair example from, David J. Farber, needs cleanup, as it appears to be capitalizing every single job title and anything like it. But I know Farber personally so I arguably shouldn't edit the article about him for at least a potential whiff of CoI concerns.]  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  02:01, 29 August 2023 (UTC)

List items, alternatives, compounds, etc. of music genres, occupations, sports positions, etc., esp. in infoboxes

I've gotten some pushback in opposite directions recently, like when I capped some music genres in a "flatlist" and when I lowercased alternatives after a slash, (as in Guard/Forward –> Guard/forward), both in infobox contexts. So I'd like to know how others interpret MOSCAPS there. My take has been to use sentence case for comma-separated and slash-separated alternatives or lists, and sentence case per item when they are formatted as a list; and I learned that Template:flatlist doesn't exactly format as a list; see its doc example

@Rikster2: who asked me at User talk:Dicklyon#Slash caps replacement to seek a consensus before doing more on this. He suggests that maybe we need an infobox-specific guideline, or perhaps something specific to player bios. What do others think? Dicklyon (talk) 18:07, 25 May 2023 (UTC)

I always assumed capitalizing all items in the list was consistent with MOS:LISTCAPS:

If the list items are sentence fragments, then capitalization should be consistent – sentence case should be applied to either all or none of the items.

—Bagumba (talk) 09:11, 26 May 2023 (UTC)
Sure, if a pair of slash separated items is considered a list and if the items are sentence fragments. To me it's not a list, and here they are not sentence fragments, so this doesn't apply; applying sentence case as in "Guard/forward" seems more consistent with MOSCAPS to me. Dicklyon (talk) 15:29, 26 May 2023 (UTC)

Also, what do hyphenated compounds like "guard-forward" and "forward-center" mean? Is this a position? Or some relation between positions that would make more sense with a dash or a slash? Dicklyon (talk) 19:00, 25 May 2023 (UTC)

It's shorthand in (some) sports for players who are skilled enough to play multiple positions. I'd give leeway to using it in an infobox if it's common in the domain. Example prose: "Pat Cummings, a Knick forward, and Michael Cooper, a Laker guard-forward, who served..." (NYT) —Bagumba (talk) 09:14, 26 May 2023 (UTC)
OK, like singer-songwriter. Dicklyon (talk) 15:29, 26 May 2023 (UTC)
Use lower-case for both. This is just more excuse-making to over-capitalize things that are subject to fandom urges to use capital letters. A player position like "forward" is not a proper name, so it's "guard-forward" or "guard/forward", which in an infobox would be first-letter capitalized: "Guard-forward". Same with {{flatlist}} or {{hlist}} giving music genres in an infobox:
That's not a list in the sense MOS:LISTCAPS is addressing. We may need to just add a line-item there to not capitalize every entry in a "list" that is put onto one line.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  22:31, 26 May 2023 (UTC)
Let's not overuse the "fandom" rant. See Bill Gates, the first occupation, Businessman is capitalized. I believe capitalizing first items, at least, is quite common on WP ibxs. —Bagumba (talk) 16:08, 27 May 2023 (UTC)
He already agreed "which in an infobox would be first-letter capitalized". There's no issue there. Dicklyon (talk) 17:02, 27 May 2023 (UTC)
Ah, I must of skimmed after "Use lower-case for both". Thanks. —Bagumba (talk) 17:16, 27 May 2023 (UTC)

I just re-fixed one of the Rikster2 reverts. Any objection to my doing the other 70 or so? Dicklyon (talk) 17:10, 27 May 2023 (UTC)

Hang on a bit for more possible feedback on flatlists and slash lists w.r.t. MOS:LISTCAPS. —Bagumba (talk) 17:21, 27 May 2023 (UTC)
Why not give me more than a day and a half to respond before implementing a “consensus” of two and a half editors? Some of us have jobs and some of those jobs are also done on Saturdays. Rikster2 (talk) 18:22, 27 May 2023 (UTC)
You had been editing other things since I pinged you here, so I thought I should either go ahead or prod a bit harder to get you to come. Thanks for showing up. But you still haven't said anything. Dicklyon (talk) 21:24, 27 May 2023 (UTC)

Another question on that one would be what to do about infobox lines like "2007 / Round: 1 / Pick: 6th overall" (as controlled centrally by Template:Infobox basketball biography). Change to "2007 / round: 1 / pick: 6th overall"? Dicklyon (talk) 17:12, 27 May 2023 (UTC)

Perhaps discuss at WT:BASKETBALL. While we're at it, maybe streamline to like "2007: 1st round, 6th overall pick" —Bagumba (talk) 17:32, 27 May 2023 (UTC)
Probably I won't take that one on; but good idea – you should propose it. Dicklyon (talk) 21:29, 27 May 2023 (UTC)
We can all mull over it. —Bagumba (talk) 02:39, 28 May 2023 (UTC)

Sports positions? Clarify, what's being requested for sports bio infoboxes content. GoodDay (talk) 21:31, 27 May 2023 (UTC)

Typically "Position: Forward/center", where Rikster2 wants Center capped. Dicklyon (talk) 21:45, 27 May 2023 (UTC)
Hi, I'm not sure where to put this, but in my opinion, positions should be capitalized after the slash. I suppose there's lots of reasons why, but mainly it's just because "Power forward / center" looks, like, really bad... if you know what I mean? As opposed to "Power forward / Center"... Idk just wanted to leave my opinion somewhere, feel free to disregard :) JAX4981 (talk) 03:51, 28 May 2023 (UTC)
Opinions are fine. Mine is that we should follow guidelines instead of opinions about how it looks. Let's hear from more... Dicklyon (talk) 04:12, 28 May 2023 (UTC)
Ok, that's fine, can you just point me to where in WT:MOSCAPS it talks about cases like this? Because it seems to be largely about actual sentences, which infoboxes aren't... I could be misunderstanding this though. I know Rikster provided 3 sources where both positions are capitalized, here's two more where both are capitalized, one of them being the official NBA website: 1 2
To be clear, I'm only concerned with specifically basketball infobox capitalization, I'm not quite smart enough to understand the rest of what is being talked about here :) JAX4981 (talk) 20:47, 28 May 2023 (UTC)
I don't know of any MOSCAPS provisions specifically about basketball infoboxes. The closest bit is about list items, which is why we're talking about interpretations of that here. Dicklyon (talk) 01:34, 29 May 2023 (UTC)
I feel like it's kinda different though, because it's not mid-sentence. At the very top of MOS:CAPS it says "Wikipedia relies on sources to determine what is conventionally capitalized; only words and phrases that are consistently capitalized in a substantial majority of independent, reliable sources are capitalized in Wikipedia." and from these 5 examples (1 2 3 4 5), I would say that those fit the criteria for a majority of reliable sources, and therefore, the position after the slash should be capitalized, no? JAX4981 (talk) 22:22, 29 May 2023 (UTC)
Here's what I see at your 5 links:
  1. Position Guard/Forward – an example of infobox-like structure
  2. G/C in a heading – not relevant
  3. This site can’t be reached Forward/Guard in infobox-like setting
  4. Denver Nuggets | #11 | Guard-Forward in a heading – not relevant
  5. Position: Point Guard, Small Forward, and Shooting Guard – definitely sentence-like noun clause, fully overcapitalized.– not relevant
And even if sources do cap in infobox-like contexts, that doesn't mean we do, if the general provision is to avoid unnecessary capitalization, and there's no exception for infoboxes. The "Wikipedia relies on sources to determine what is capitalized" is about "what", not "where". Dicklyon (talk) 23:22, 29 May 2023 (UTC)
I'm not sure why the third link can't be reached, it's a USA basketball link with an infobox-like structure that says: "Positions Forward/Guard"
Also, I'm not sure why the fifth link wouldn't be relevant, as it's a source used in almost every basketball player's page.
And as for the what vs. where, I don't see why "what" can't include "where"
Anyway, my point is that I disagree, but I'm going to leave it there because I don't have much more to say. Hopefully someone with more knowledge than me on the subject can chime in here. I appreciate you taking the time to respond :) JAX4981 (talk) 23:39, 29 May 2023 (UTC)
That link is working for me now, so I struck the "can't be reached" and noted what it says. As for the last one, title-case phrases like "Point Guard" and "Small Forward" show that they're using title case, not sentence case like WP does, so not relevant to how to apply sentence case across a slash or comma. Thanks for your efforts, too. Let's wait and see who else has opinions or info. Dicklyon (talk) 02:57, 30 May 2023 (UTC)
User:JAX4981 You are right! It does look bad! That was my claim because I told User:Dicklyon that it just doesn’t look proper! ReaganHoang10 (talk) 20:07, 5 July 2023 (UTC)
Your reverts with edit summaries like "Help me God" and "You've got to be kidding me" are no substitute for discussing and following the guidelines. Please stop that. Dicklyon (talk) 03:49, 6 July 2023 (UTC)
Ok, I apologize for those comments but still. ReaganHoang10 (talk) 05:32, 6 July 2023 (UTC)
And for genres, things like "genre = Indie rock, alternative rock, folk rock" (no pushback there; WP has a lot like this and also a lot over-capped. Dicklyon (talk) 00:30, 28 May 2023 (UTC)
Agreed. What's going on here is basically a proposal to change the dominant site-wide practice – on a technicality, a wikilawyering nitpick over what "list" might mean for capitalization purposes. All of us who've been around during most of MoS's formation already know that it doesn't mean to write |genre=[[Indie rock]], [[Alternative rock]], [[Folk rock]]. If we need to clarify the guideline wording to make this clearer, then do it. But see also WP:AJR.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  15:26, 31 May 2023 (UTC)
In the case of genres in infoboxes, I've been fixing away, and there's no pushback. On the basketball positions, I've paused while we discuss. Seems to be the exact same issue, except it's more often slash than comma. Does that make a differrence? Can we hear a few more opinions before consider whether this needs clarifiation in MOSCAPS? A similar question has come up with dash-separated things in tennis tables (discussion linked at #Current. Dicklyon (talk) 15:42, 31 May 2023 (UTC)
For context only, not an argument for one convention over another, but basketball positions are often listed by their abbrev: forward (F), center (C), and guard (G). Multi-positional players would be listed as F/C, G/F. The tendency to want "Forward/ Center" capitalized likely stems from "FC" being in caps, and the belief that also extends to its expansion. Likely not uncommon logic, or a sinister cabal, which is presumably why MOS:EXPABBR addressed the phenomena.—Bagumba (talk) 08:45, 3 July 2023 (UTC)
Yes, such thinking is commonly part of the problem, and there's no objection to capitalizing such initialisms. Dicklyon (talk) 03:49, 6 July 2023 (UTC)

The guidance at MOS:LISTCAPS seems pretty clearly focused on not capitalizing.~TPW 17:05, 6 September 2023 (UTC)

Breed capitalization

Is there any appetite for a new RfC on breed capitalization? The reigning RfC seems increasingly out of place/a relic of the early 2000s, considering the stated aim to 'avoid unnecessary capitalization' and that advice on the topic outside of the industry is predominantly to not capitalize outside of proper nouns (perhaps with a few exceptions like 'Old English' and 'Great Dane', plus overriding trademark rules). A lot of effort has been put into this previously (WP:BREEDCASE) by @SMcCandlish. Perhaps a new RfC could avoid straying into the endless debate over what constitutes a standardized breed? To be clear, while I'd certainly help with the potentially resulting cleanup, I'm not all that well versed on RfCs, so I'm likely not the one to put forward a proposal. Star Garnet (talk) 17:00, 5 June 2023 (UTC)

I don't think I want to wade back into this. It was very draining, and I'm skeptical that the consensus from the 2019 RfC would change. I tend to agree with you in principle, but the pain won't be worth it.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  23:12, 5 June 2023 (UTC)
If it does come up, please do ping me and I'll participate. ~TPW 17:06, 6 September 2023 (UTC)

Linked miscapitalizations

At Wikipedia:Database reports/Linked miscapitalizations we have a daily-updated report of miscapitalized redirects that have links from articles. I've been working away on fixing those, and have eliminated the great majority of them by working from the "short end", where the miscapped redirect has only 1, 2, or 3 links to it. Previous to that, I was using JWB to work on the long end (where currently Softbank has the most links, which should be SoftBank in probably all cases). But that got interrupted by my JWB access being shut off due to a complain at ANI, so I won't be able to do much on those bulk items. Anyone want to help there? Dicklyon (talk) 02:11, 12 September 2023 (UTC)

It looks like there are about 700 instances of PlayStation miscapitalized as Playstation. I've fixed a dozen or so via linked miscapitalizations, but there are more there and a lot that don't show up there. Anyone want to help fix? Or should I maybe put in a request for AWB help now that I'm not allowed to do it myself? Dicklyon (talk) 06:17, 16 September 2023 (UTC)

Implementation of RFC concerning NHL playoff rounds

FWIW, the RFC result concerning NHL playoffs pages, having their rounds decapitalised (except for the final), has yet to be fully implemented. AFAIK, it's only been applied to the 2023 Stanley Cup playoffs pages. GoodDay (talk) 19:15, 17 September 2023 (UTC)

I did an awful lot of downcasing of things like "Preliminary Round" across a bunch of sports, but I don't think I ever made a special effort to finish up on hockey. Now I'm unable to use JWB, so probably won't work on those much. But if you can give a couple of examples with links, that might motivate me or someone to have a look. Dicklyon (talk) 20:02, 17 September 2023 (UTC)
Mainly, from the 1982 Stanley Cup playoffs to the 2022 Stanley Cup playoffs pages. GoodDay (talk) 20:18, 17 September 2023 (UTC)
I did this big messy edit on the latter. Let's see if it sticks. Probably didn't fix quite everything in that mass of over-capitalization. Dicklyon (talk) 00:45, 18 September 2023 (UTC)

Here's the RFC being referred to. Dicklyon (talk) 20:10, 17 September 2023 (UTC)

RACECAPS note h

Hello! I have a question about note h, which currently reads:

A June–December 2020 proposal to capitalize "Black" (only) concluded against that idea, and also considered "Black and White", and "black and white", with no consensus to implement a rule requiring either or against mixed use where editors at a particular article believe it's appropriate. The status quo practice had been that either style was permissible, and this proposal did not overturn that. The somewhat unclear proposal closure was refined January–April 2021 and implemented, after a February–March 2021 overhaul of the rest of this section
(bold added to part that's the basis for my confusion).

Perhaps I'm having a brain lapse, but I'm not following the bolded text. Is it saying that there was "no consensus to implement a rule either requiring or prohibiting mixed use"? I ask because there's currently some edit warring going on at Tulsa race massacre on whether mixed capitalization is allowed. I'd note that, in early 2022, there was a subsequent discussion on this talk page as to mixed usage.--Jerome Frank Disciple (talk) 15:06, 14 April 2023 (UTC)

Reading the discussions, my conclusion is that its stating that there was no consensus to implement a rule requiring "Black/White" or "black/white" and that there was no consensus to implement a rule against mixed use, allowing for its usage where editors at a particular article believe it's appropriate (which I think is important to note, as mixed use primarily has to do with American race relations, and would be inappropriate elsewhere). Therefore, reverting or changing existing norms in the article over capitalization would fall under MOS:STYLEVAR, which states that When either of two styles are acceptable it is inappropriate for a Wikipedia editor to change from one style to another unless there is some substantial reason for the change. :3 F4U (they/it) 05:03, 16 April 2023 (UTC)
In general usage for decades now, there's been a tendency for more left-leaning and African-American writers to capitalize "Black" as it has come to name a culture and ethnicity in the African diaspora; notably in the wake of things like the Black power movement. Whereas "white" is not generally a specific culture/ethnicity. Often "white" is capitalized by White supremacists. So, mixed usage, varying with context. - CorbieVreccan ☊ ☼ 20:00, 16 April 2023 (UTC)
That's the "Hitler liked cats so cats must be bad" fallacy. White supremacists also capitalize "Chinese" and "Maori" but we wouldn't consider writing them lower-case because white supremacists use upper-case. Major publishers like The Washington Post routinely capitalize White in the ethno-racial sense, right along with Black.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  02:36, 25 May 2023 (UTC)

Comment Note the use of Blak culture and Blak sovereignty (always capitalised) in Australia. I don't know if these needs a mention in the style guide. SMcCandlish? There will no doubt be at least one full article about either or both at some point. (And as an aside, Indigenous and Aboriginal are always capitalised when referring to First Nations people or languages in Australia). Laterthanyouthink (talk) 02:19, 25 May 2023 (UTC)

A bridge to cross when we come to it. Coloured is capitalized in the South African context. The issue at real debate here is the practice of some on the American left to write "Black but white" and whether WP should adopt it. So far there has been no consensus to do so, and I would think that one would not develop. A side matter has been whether things like "the indigenous peoples of South America" or "the native cultures of northern China" should have a capitalized "Indigenous" and "Native", and again we have not reached a consensus to do that and probably will not.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  02:39, 25 May 2023 (UTC)
Thanks for your response. Yes - in South Africa, Coloured refers to a specific ethnicity though, not all people of colour, so slightly different. The Black vs white capitalisation is also a bit of an issue in Australia (and the term can mean different things to different people see Black Australians), with variation in capitalisation seen in the media and other literature. Laterthanyouthink (talk) 02:55, 25 May 2023 (UTC)
Our current de facto practice of being consistent ("black and white" or "Black and White") within an article is probably good enough for now, but I've said before that I think this needs to come to a proper RfC at some point so we have a clearer answer. (My own personal opinion is that these terms should be capitalized as ethnonyms, even if informal ones; and I do it that way. It's especially jarring to see something like "Asian, black, Hispanic, Native American, Pacific Islander, or white", as if two are being de-capitalized to denigrate them.)  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  07:14, 25 May 2023 (UTC)
I agree. When "Black" and "White" are being used as a race/ethnicity they should be capitalized. Rreagan007 (talk) 00:02, 20 September 2023 (UTC)
Absolutely, it looks bad. Doug Weller talk 12:08, 20 September 2023 (UTC)

Headings: should content after a colon be capitalized?

Hi all, I'm wondering if there's still consensus that content after a colon in a heading should not be capitalized.

The current guidance, in my opinion, seems counter to many peoples' intuition– I believe this may be because a colon is usually used after a date, so the secondary title includes the first capitalizable text. (I've even had my changes in this issue reverted, prompting me to question the guidance altogether.)

For reference, MOS:SECTIONCAPS gives these examples as guidance:

Use: 1891–1940: early history
Avoid: 1891–1940: Early history

Thanks! Wracking 💬 02:01, 18 May 2023 (UTC)

There have been very similar topics discussed in October 2022, March 2022, and August 2021, mostly around capitalizing after numbers, and in all of them it was made clear that section headings, as article titles, use sentence case, in which only the first character of a sentence is capitalized (and proper nouns, of course), meaning that neither the first letter after a number nor the first letter after a colon should be capitalized. —El Millo (talk) 02:10, 18 May 2023 (UTC)
I see in the October 2022 discussion that @Spongeworthy93 provided a list of off-wiki examples of sentence case titles with a colon. Personally, I think those are compelling. APA also says to capitalize after a colon in sentence case titles. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Wracking 💬 02:20, 18 May 2023 (UTC)
It says that the first word after a colon is also capitalized when what follows the colon is an independent clause (emphasis mine), not in every case after a colon. Still, while APA suggest this, the Chicago Manual of Style suggest using lowercase after colon, unless what follows consists of two or more complete sentences.[1] —El Millo (talk) 02:40, 18 May 2023 (UTC)
The rules for sentences and sentence-case titles are different. Both APA and Chicago Manual of Style support capitalizing a subheading (text after a colon) using sentence case.
For titles, APA says "Capitalize the first word of the title/heading and of any subtitle/subheading".[2]
Chicago Manual of Style says, "In headlines or chapter titles or other display type, it’s normal to cap after a colon, even if the title or heading is in sentence case (see CMOS 8.158) and whether or not the part after the colon is a grammatically complete sentence."[3] Examples given by Chicago Manual of Style are as follows:[4]
  • The house of Rothschild: The world’s banker, 1849–1999
  • Crossing Magnolia denudata with M. liliiflora to create a new hybrid: A success story
Wracking 💬 17:43, 18 May 2023 (UTC)
Well, hold on a moment. You say Both APA and Chicago Manual of Style support capitalizing a subheading (text after a colon), but that seems to misinterpret what APA says, at least. APA does not (AFAICS) say what follows a colon constitutes a subheading. They say only, the first word after a colon is also capitalized when what follows the colon is an independent clause. — JohnFromPinckney (talk / edits) 22:15, 19 May 2023 (UTC)
@JohnFromPinckney: I think you're looking at the wrong APA section. See the link at ref 2 below. Deor (talk) 22:26, 19 May 2023 (UTC)
The link at ref 2 below is the one I followed. That's the place I looked and whence I copied the excerpt I pasted here. Where, exactly, do you (or Wracking, who actually made the claim I'm questioning) see that the APA says that what follows a colon is a subtitle/subheading? — JohnFromPinckney (talk / edits) 08:42, 20 May 2023 (UTC)
Sources generally characterize the bit following the "main" title/heading as a subtitle/subheading.[5] That aside, here's APA: In sentence case, lowercase most words in a title or heading. Capitalize only the following words: [...] the first word after a colon, em dash, or end punctuation in a heading.[6] Wracking 💬 16:38, 20 May 2023 (UTC)
WP would not capitalize after an em-dash either. I think what's going on here is APA is interpreting all of these things as titles, and individually applying sentence case to each fragment divided by a colon or em-dash. And we tend to do that with off-site articles' sentence-case titles in citations, e.g |title=Mammal barbering 101: The aerodynamics of shaved weasels – To shave or not to shave (though this would depend on the citation style a particular editor was most used to; some would not use the captal Ts, and some would re-render the entire title in title case). But WP-internal article headings are treated as headings, as dividers, and formatted the same as list items, table headers, image captions, etc.: just plain sentence case as a single string (except where a new full sentence occurs, which is common enough in list items and image captions, but not headings or table headers). Whether that was a great idea or not is kind of moot now, after 20+ years.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  07:23, 25 May 2023 (UTC)
Use lower-case, per previous discussions of this. PS: WP:MOS does not slavishly follow Chicago (which itself changes over time). Otherwise MoS would just consist of a summary of Chicago instead of being its own style guide. MoS is our best community effort to synthesize all style guides into something that works well on Wikipedia. Do not let your head explode when MoS disagrees with something in some particular other style guide.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  02:41, 25 May 2023 (UTC)
I appreciate your comments. I'm not confused about the rules or how they work. My argument is that the MOS should be different. I cited other style guides to clear up other editors' confusion about the general understanding of "sentence case" (including off-wiki). I cannot find any style guide that treats sentence case display text as Wikipedia does, and I think that's notable. Thanks. Wracking 💬 03:13, 25 May 2023 (UTC)
SMcCandlish, I'm relatively new to Wikipedia so I apologize if I brought these thoughts to the wrong place. Maybe I'll look at WP:VPPOL for this. Thanks. Wracking 💬 03:23, 25 May 2023 (UTC)
This seems as good a place as any. WP decided on a paricular form of sentence case for headings way back in its early days, and changing it now would be a monumental task for no gain. There's not a clear reader-facing reason to do it. Unlike, say, fixing rampant over-capitalization of terms just because they have something to do with a sport or dancing or videogames or the government or some other topic where people like to ignore MOS:SIGCAPS. That kind of stuff is mentally jarring to readers. "Why is this capitalized? Is it a proper name? A trademark? Is this some form of emphasis?" But it's really unlikely that many of them would notice a heading difference between "Blah blah: yak yak yak" and "Blah blah: Yak yak yak").  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  07:08, 25 May 2023 (UTC)
The current rule (do not capitalize after a colon in a header) isn’t being followed, though. That’s why I brought this up in the first place. So I’m not sure how "monumental" this task would actually be, as it wouldn’t involve large-scale changing of articles. :] Wracking 💬 15:06, 25 May 2023 (UTC)
Indeed, capitalization after dash and colon and quite common, and often well defended. But the way to fix inconsistency is to move toward what the guideline suggests, not change the guideline and start going the other direction. Dicklyon (talk) 18:11, 25 May 2023 (UTC)
I disagree. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I think, in this case, Wikipedia should take a descriptivist approach, as the prescriptivist one clearly isn't working. (In my informal survey, about 85% of articles follow APA/Chicago, not WP on this issue. Let me know if you need details on my methodology lol)
I don't think any arguments for the status quo have been very strong, as they've been mistaken about the use of sentence case off-wiki and argued that because the rules are old they shouldn't be changed (even though, IMO, cited past discussion has been not on this topic, shallow, and misinformed). Maybe I'm under a false impression about the changeability of the MOS, then. Wracking 💬 18:27, 25 May 2023 (UTC)
I don't see any statistical analysis proving that a majority of colons in WP headings are followed by a capital letter. The fact that you've run into a few cases of it doesn't prove anything, other than what's already been said many times before: No one has to comply with MoS to write here, and no one is expected to memorize MoS. (It primarily exists as a cleanup reference work for WP:GNOMEs and a means of settling recurrent, disruptive style disputes.) There is no line-item in MoS, or in any other guideline or policy, that is not routinely violated by editors, because editors mostly do not read our P&G pages. That doesn't mean we should reverse all the rules to do what the rule-ignorers are doing.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  22:37, 26 May 2023 (UTC)
Please don't twist my words. I did not say we should reverse all rules. I said we should reverse this rule.
Here is the informal survey I did:
  • It is not possible (AFAIK) to search article text for punctuation or case sensitivity, so I instead searched for a phrase that often appears in this particular header formation. On 25 May, I searched "early years", a common phrase used in headers that include colons. I reviewed the first 250 results, 40 of which included a colon in the header.
  • The results were as follows: 85% capitalize after the colon, 10% do not.
And here's the data:
Extended content
Thanks. Wracking 💬 00:35, 27 May 2023 (UTC)

References

  1. ^ https://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/qanda/data/faq/topics/Capitalization/faq0008.html
  2. ^ https://blog.apastyle.org/apastyle/2012/03/title-case-and-sentence-case-capitalization-in-apa-style.html
  3. ^ https://cmosshoptalk.com/2022/02/15/when-to-capitalize-after-a-colon/
  4. ^ The Chicago Manual of Style 17th edition. 8.158: Principles and examples of sentence-style capitalization.
  5. ^ https://dissertation.laerd.com/style-guides-for-dissertation-titles-p2.php#:~:text=The%20first%20letter%20of%20a,Subtitle%20OR%20Title%20%E2%80%94%20Subtitle)
  6. ^ https://apastyle.apa.org/style-grammar-guidelines/capitalization/sentence-case

Hmm. That might be a significant enough trend to just RfC this then, to codify a style change. Doing "Foo bar: baz" instead of "Foo bar: Baz" is really a completely arbitrary preference; there's no meaning difference. Changing to "Foo bar: Baz" would mean changing an almost unbelievable number of headings, which is a point against the idea. But it would also be more consistent with our typical treatment of sentence-case titles in citations, which is a point if favor.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  14:52, 31 May 2023 (UTC)

I was looking for past discussions on this in the aftermath of #RFC on capitalizing after dash in sports article names below, and I saw that this discussion was still open (i.e. unarchived). I firmly believe the policy should be amended to allow for uppercase after a colon or en dash when it is being used as an introductory separator in an article title, section heading, or bulleted list item; the "do not capitalize after a colon or dash" rule only makes sense in prose. As I wrote below, the text that follows a colon or en dash in an article title, section heading, or bulleted list item is not a complete sentence but a sentence fragment, so we should not be following capitalization rules meant for sentences in prose. If you think about it, this is akin to subtitles in titles of works, whose first word we capitalize per MOS:TITLECAPS. InfiniteNexus (talk) 05:01, 12 September 2023 (UTC)
Wikipedia title style is nearly identical to the AP headline style. I won't share directly from the AP site since that's subscription-only, but this post gives enough information to see what that style's about. There's no particular exception triggered by any kind of dash. ~TPW 13:27, 12 September 2023 (UTC)
Wikipedia title style does not follow any style guide. Furthermore, as far as I know, most style guides recommend using title case (i.e. akin to MOS:TITLECAPS) instead of sentence case like Wikipeda for article titles and section headings. I believe there should be an RfC to amend our policy. InfiniteNexus (talk) 00:38, 15 September 2023 (UTC)
WP:AT gives voice to WP:NCCAPS. That in turn gives voice to MOS:CAPS. MOS:AT is part of WP:MOS. WP:MOS and MOS:CAPS does apply to article titles. Furthermore, the WP:P&G linked is consistent across those linked pages. Cinderella157 (talk) 02:43, 15 September 2023 (UTC)
And I'm not contesting that. I'm saying the guideline should be changed. This is one of those guidelines that exist, only nobody follows it because common sense tells us it's not good writing. InfiniteNexus (talk) 04:19, 15 September 2023 (UTC)
Open up Google News or some other source of article headlines and you will see that there are a wide variety of capitalization styles used. When I looked at Google News just now sentence case was dominant. Wikipedia's style is not out of step with other sources.  SchreiberBike | ⌨  21:01, 15 September 2023 (UTC)
Thank you for that. Yes, now Ctrl+F all the colons on the page and count how many sentence-case titles capitalize the first letter after the colon. Let me see ... hmm, seems like it's virtually all of them. InfiniteNexus (talk) 21:51, 15 September 2023 (UTC)

information Note: Please see #RfC on capitalization after a colon or dash. InfiniteNexus (talk) 17:48, 20 September 2023 (UTC)

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