[WikiEN-l] A plea for sanity in capitalisation from the coalface

Sat Apr 26 08:59:12 UTC 2003

Over and over again, a small number of good, decent Wikipedia
contributors are causing difficulties for those of us who are actually
doing the hard yards in the fauna articles. All the major contributors
to the bird entries, for example, have complained about this on the
talk pages, but nothing is ever done. People keep claiming that, for
example, the Common Raven should be written as "common raven". One need
only reach to the bookshelf and pick up a reference work to discover
that this just ain't so. All we ask is that we follow our own naming
convention: 

I quote: "Unless the term you wish to create a page for is a proper
noun OR IS OTHERWISE ALMOST ALWAYS CAPITALISED." Species names for the
higher orders (and possibly the lower ones too) are indeed "almost
always capitalised" and rightly so, as to do anything else is to court
ambiguity and lose clarity.

We, the people WHO ACTUALLY WRITE THE ENTRIES have had a gut full of
it. Please stop before the real contributors in this area get sick of
the whole damn thing and take their effort elswhere.

Tony Wilson
(Tannin)
list at redhill.net.au