First, there was a message in the last batch of email that
had huge quotes, re-quotes, and so forth, so much so that
one section had eight, count them, eight, quoting
marks/indents. Please, people, clean up your emails. You
don't need to quote every preceding transaction on a topic.
Secondly, I appreciate the mav/tannin compromise on
capitalization, and, hey, you see, a compromise was
possible, now, wasn't it? Having said that, Tannin, I have
to take you to task for being rather insulting by
implication to everyone who wasn't one of your self-selected
clique of "three or four" experts. What work I've done on
fauna is reasonable and a good starting point, and if you
don't like it, then it takes a lot less time for you to edit
it than it takes to write it in the first place.
Now, I want to be sure that this rule is being applied to
fauna, and not flora. It's true that many if not most
popular reference works capitalize common names for flora,
but authoritative works such as Gleason & Cronquist
generally do not except for the first letter when it's in
the first word mentioned (as in capitalizing the first word
in a sentence) or when it's a proper name, such as New York
fern.
--
John Knouse
jaknouse(a)frognet.net