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

Sun Apr 27 19:44:42 UTC 2003

Tannin wrote:
>[agreement with compromise]
>....
> My suggestion is that we should start from the idea that if the
> intention of the article is to single out that *particular* *species*
> as opposed some *other* species, then capitalisation is correct.
>....

This seems like a good rule but I would venture to guess that the only place 
the up style would be needed is in a small set of articles about the 
particular animals and a few other places that compare and contrast them. The 
subtle ambiguity issues that the up style addresses hardly ever come-up 
outside of that context. There is, for example, no other bird in the US 
called "bald eagle" other than the "Bald Eagle" that I'm aware of.

In a general context our readers are not going to get the distinction between 
"bald eagle" and "Bald Eagle" anyway. But when comparing two species then 
capitalization can be used to make things more clear.

This is a subtle point of grammar that I'm sure only the most astute of our 
copyeditors will notice. Our naming convention on capitalization should be 
updated to reflect this subtly. 

There will be a problem with edit links though - under this scheme we will 
tolerate up style and down style red links which could potentially result in 
duplicated effort (something our naming conventions aim to reduce). But we 
already live with a similar "red link problem" because we tolerate British 
and American spelling variations. I'm not aware of that being real problem. 

So if the people doing the bulk of the work on those articles don't mind this 
side-effect then I don't mind. 

--Daniel Mayer (aka mav)