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

Sun Apr 27 02:48:42 UTC 2003

I agree totally with Tannin on capitalisation. If an expert on an area 
writes a page that shows that that expert knows what s/he is talking about, 
why should someone who knows nothing on the topic and may not have heard 
about the topic until s/he saw the article, have the right to decide that 
THEY know the correct capitalisation and change everything? I have lost 
count of the number of good, accurate articles I have seen on wiki which 
have been reduced to semi-literate gibberish by clumsy illinformed editing 
and screwed capitalisation based on questionable wiki conventions on 
capitalisation. Many editors do a very good job, but some are appalling. If 
you trust people enough to write articles, can you not trust them enough to 
know that if they say bird 'x', office 'y' or voting system 'z' is written 
in that form, they KNOW what they are talking about. At least query the use 
with them. Don't unilaterally dump their work when you don't know the facts.

Last week we had a talk in my university about the ever dropping standards 
of english among students. Students are docked marks for making a mess of 
capitalisation in key areas. And many of the errors condemned by the Heads 
of Department were things wiki practically enforces in its illinformed and 
inaccurate conventions on capitalisation. If a student writes about 'Vice 
president', 'First minister', 'Prime minister', 'First past the post', 
'Proportional representation using a single transferable vote', they are in 
grave danger of failing their exams. Most of these have been corrected on 
wiki, but in some cases I had to fight edit wars to get the correct 
capitalisation rules followed.

I do not doubt but that some of those enforcing the wiki rules, and some of 
those making up the rules, are well meaning, earnest and capable. But they 
have got to realise that wiki should follow the best standards of accuracy, 
not the lowest common denominator in what we can get away with. If it cannot 
capitalise properly, and mislead students into how to use formal names of 
terms that are treated as proper nouns, then academics are simply going to 
say to their students: 'avoid Wikipedia. It is simply too unreliable'. 
Wikipedia deserves better than that but it will have itself to blame if it 
gets that reputation.

JT

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