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Capitalization discussions ongoing [keep at top of talk page]

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This section is an excerpt from Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Capital letters § Capitalization discussions ongoing (keep at top of talk page).[edit]

Add new items at top of list; move to Concluded when decided, and summarize the conclusion. Comment at them if interested. Please keep this section at the top of the page.

Current

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(newest on top) Move requests:

Other discussions:

Pretty stale but not "concluded":

Concluded

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Extended content
2024
2023
2022
2021

Capitalization of geologic names

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This is a problem I've been having for many years and I can't find any guidelines for it on Wikipedia. Some sources fully capitalize the names of geologic features while others do not, making it difficult to decide what format is more appropriate for an article title. This has resulted in inconsistencies throughout Wikipedia. For example, Dieng Volcanic Complex vs. Paipa-Iza volcanic complex and East African Rift vs. Bahr el Arab rift. The closest guidelines I could find are Wikipedia:Manual of Style # Geographical items and Wikipedia:Naming conventions (geographic names) which are for geographical features rather than geological ones. Volcanoguy 01:23, 21 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]

This is more of a WT:MOSCAPS question, since this isn't about article titles in particular. The answer for this is the same as for any other capitalization question: 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. (From lead of MOS:CAPS.) So, if these kinds of features are not capitalized across the vast majority of all reliable source material, they shouldn't be capitalized on Wikipedia. N-grams may not always be much help, since some of these terms don't appear in enough books to even rate on the graph [1][2].  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  02:21, 21 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I would generally agree with SMcCandlish and the broad guidance at MOS:CAPS. Such noun phrases (titles) are of the format proper noun that should be capitalised, followed by a descriptor (eg rift). There is a common misperception that if the first part of the noun phrase is capitalised, then all parts of the phrase should be capitalised. True proper nouns are not descriptive (eg a volcanic complex at a certain place is a descriptive name, with the place midifying the descriptor). When we are dealing with a descriptive term in a noun phrase, the presumption should be that it is not capitalised unless the evidence of usage is telling us otherwise. If there isn't evidence of vast usage of a term then one cannot assert capitalisation in a vast majority of sources. This just comes down to whether we have a statistically significant sample set to reach a conclusion on whether something should be capitalised. Cinderella157 (talk) 02:05, 14 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Right. And the MOS:CAPS and WP:NCCAPS gist is: default to lower-case, unless that vast evidence of capitalization can be shown.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  04:20, 14 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
OP observes, "Some sources fully capitalize the names of geologic features while others do not". Per the basic criterion of MOS:CAPS ("only words and phrases that are consistently capitalized in a substantial majority of independent, reliable sources are capitalized in Wikipedia"), where that observation is true, we use lowercase. Dicklyon (talk) 03:25, 23 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I do see a lot of inconsistency in this space. We've had recent multi-RM discussions with consensus to lowercase "plate" and "fracture zone", and we have one open now about "terrane". Probably we'll do more, but I expect some of the Basins, Rifts, Troughs, Ridges, Faults, Grabens, Cratons, and such are actually proper names, consistently capped in sources. Not all are, though, especially those with "system" or "zone" appended, as here or here. Dicklyon (talk) 05:19, 14 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Australian Government

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Not planning on looking into this much, but is this correctly capitalized? InfiniteNexus (talk) 06:48, 8 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Seems to be, at least in this sense (of the extant goverment that officially calls itself the Australian Government, of the nation-state of Australia). There has been other colonial-onward governance in Australia (which was originally called New South Wales), i.e. "Australian government" as a mass noun or "Austrlian governments" as a plural count noun, for which the Australian Government might not be the proper name. E.g., the Australian Constitution (1900) would seem to have it in long form as the Executive Government of the Commonwealth of Australia, usually shortened in one phrasing or another, with capitalization of those forms inconsistent. Anyway, "the Foo Government" seems marginally the most common construction (in English) for these things, e.g. the United States Government (abbreviated U.S. Goverment, US Government, or in some inside the Beltway contexts as USG), but quite often it's the other order, e.g. Government of Canada ("Canadian government" seems to be a journalistic shorthand, not used officially, and usually without "G"); and the Government of Ireland since 1920 ("Irish government" also frequently occurs, but usually without "G", and does not appear to be an official name, though I ran into a little use of it seemingly informally in some departmental materials). The UK is weird; the Government of the United Kingdom has quite a bit of currency and seems to be usually treated as if a proper name, but the real/official proper name is technically His [formerly Her] Majesty's Government, and "the UK government" seems to usually be lower-cased as a descriptive appellation (even at governmental sites). UK and some other parliamentary countries are a bit odd also in that they distinguish between "Parliament" and "the Government", despite the government being run by the Prime Minister who is of the parliament (the legislative body) and not a non-parliamentary official (as in most presidential-type systems); plus the term "government" gets used in a count-noun, common-noun way differently, to mean specific governments put together by specific PMs ("Rishi Sunak's government" or "the government of Riski Sunak"). In American usage, Congress is part of the US government (the US system of governance), but not part of the capital-G US Government (the executive branch), so I guess it's not that dissimilar from the distinction the UK Parliament is drawing, despite there being much less separation of powers in the UK and most other parliamentary systems. Gets complicated in other ways in the UK; e.g. the overall parliament in Great Britain now calls itself the UK Parliament, but was historically more often the Parliament of the United Kingdom (often informally the British Parliament, which seemed more often to be capitalized than to get a "p", though it seems to be slipping into disuse now, is usually found in non-UK media, and usually with "p"). Meanwhile the devolved one in Scotland is officially the Scottish Parliament not "the Scotland Parliament" or "the Parliament of Scotland"; same with the Scottish Government (not "the Government of Scotland", etc.). Various states (often of a "revolutionary" character) often have more complicated names for their governments, like Supreme Political Council, etc.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  15:20, 10 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]
FYI
 – Pointer to relevant discussion elsewhere.

Please see Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style#"Acronyms in page titles" is mis-placed in an MoS page. In short, the material needs to move to a naming-conventions guideline, but which page? WP:NCCAP is one of them, but might need a slight rename.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  15:19, 12 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Always or consistently capitalized?

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I recently edited the following sentence in the guideline intro "For multiword page titles, 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" to read "...that would consistently occur capitalized..." My edit was reverted.

I assumed that the intent of the statement was to address the fact that a number of sources may capitalize terms in the titles of articles, but not in the running text, and that "always" meant always within a single source.

However, in a recent move discussion, another user interpreted this statement to mean always in every source.

The idea that a term is literally always capitalized in every source is untenable and adherence to such a rule would require major changes at Wikipedia. For example, "Second World War" and "American Civil War" are not invariably capitalized. The Economist, a respected major publication, doesn't capitalize either per its Style Guide. (p. 176 of the 2018 edition; e.g. here, here and here), while Wikipedia does.

And if "always" is not to be taken literally, then it probably doesn't belong in a guideline.

​​​What say ye? —  AjaxSmack  18:51, 18 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  • It is a truism that proper names|nouns are always capitalised. The spirit and intent of the truism does not mean that we will never find an instance where this is not the case but it will be inconsequential and probably attributable to a typographical error. Statistically, these would be outliers. Given the spirit and intent of always as used here, it is not intended to be taken literally and imply absolute uniformity but it does set a very high bar since the truism is followed with near universal consistency. Not everything that is written should be taken absolutely literally. To argue same is in essence reductio ad absurdum. I note that always has existed in this guidance since its inception. The ngrams for Second World War (here) does now show near universal capitalisation, even if that was not always the case. That is because it is arguably not a true proper name but a descriptive name capitalised for emphasis or significance. We see the same for American Civil War here. As to the assumption of intent proposed by AjaxSmack, I see nothing in the overall guidance that would support such a reading between the lines. Cinderella157 (talk) 04:11, 19 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • "Always" here means "always, by competent writers, in actually reliable sources independent of the subject". There are many, many things that some professional writers capitalize and others do not, and about 95% of tedious "style warfare" on Wikipedia is about these things - stuff that people like to capitalize if they are fans of it, if it pertains to their business, if they think it's important/influential/famous, if they think doing so shows deference/respect (and they feel like offering it), or simply because they are terrible writers who think that capital letters exist for providing a form of emphasis, a habit found in advertising and in some bureaucratese. These things are objectively not proper names, because they are not found consistently capitalized across virtually all of the reliable source material. Instead, they are affected by partial capitalization whorls of subjective preference that reflect a mixture of non-neutral promotionalism, jargon-mongering (specialist-to-specialist writing habits), and simply poor writing skills.

    We should not make any changes that encourage more "Give me capitalization of my pet subject or give me death!" behavior, from any quarter. The problem with moving from "always" to "consistently" in this guideline (about titles, which are the only "style" matter the community has seen fit to make a matter of policy instead of just guidelines) is that there is no clear definition of "consistently" in this context, and we already have the problem that use of this term in MOS:CAPS has resulted in about two decades of protracted battlegrounding to force WP to capitalize various things that certain editors badly want capitalized for their own personal (and sometimes third-party offsite interest) reasons. The last thing we need to happen is for WP:NCCAPS to become similarly wishwashy and subject to never-ending dispute about just how much capitalization counts as "consistently". In actual practice, the standard amounts to about a 90%+ rate, going by historical patterns of results at well-attended RMs and other debates about such matters. But the pressure from the capitals fans is never relaxed even for a moment, aiming to reduce this to more like 80%, or 65%, or 50.00001%. This is long-term problematic, because the slow-movewar gameplayers who want to over-capitalize things have a years-long obsession with getting what they want, while the vast majority of editors don't really care all that much one way or other and lose patience with it, resulting in something of a war of attrition. It's usual "civil PoV-pushing" problem that a party damned well determined to get what they want, and carefully skirting behavioral rule limits, can push and push and push for years until they finally exhaust the opposition, who all have more important things on their minds.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  19:13, 19 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

    • ​If "'always' here means 'always, by competent writers, in actually reliable sources independent of the subject'", then how do you feel about the American Civil War et al? Should that article be moved, is the Economist incompetent or is there a lack of virtue in this case in your "across virtually all of the reliable source material"? I agree that we "should not make any changes that encourage more 'Give me capitalization of my pet subject or give me death!' behavior", but a guideline should be a realistic, not pointily polemical. —  AjaxSmack  00:21, 23 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]
      How I personal "feel" about a particular subject doesn't matter much. The ngram evidence suggests that "American Civil War" is super-mega-overwhelmingly capitalized in source material [3] (even when American sources are excluded [4]). Lower-casing sources on this one are close to non-existent. So, this is consistently capitalized in reliable sources, to a level that amounts to "always" if one doesn't want to be an extreme literalist in a WP:LAWYER vein. If The Econonomist ends up being an ultra-rare hold out that writes "American civil war", who cares? WP is not written to The Economist Style Guide (and not much else is beyond The Economist and its side publications), nor does that publisher follow our style guide. The existence of conflicting styles is why we have style guidelines in the first place, so the fact that another style conflict can be found "in the wild" doesn't have any implications for our style guidelines. The existence of a style guide that might even be more downcasing than WP's own doesn't mean WP should adopt its preferences or even that internal supporters of WP having a general downcasing approach by default will necessarily agree with an "ultra-downcasing" one found externally. I may be personally "pointed" in my criticism of style-related battlegrounding behavior, but this (and other guidelines) are not worded in that way, so there's not a tone problem to address here. To the extent that the simple wording in this guideline might inspire an attempt at tedious wikilawyering by someone to rule out capitalization if one single instance of lowercasing is ever found offsite (a viewpoint the community would not accept, but which it couldn't prevent being advanced by someone), this could possibly be dissuaded by replacing "always" with what I used above: "always, by competent writers, in actually reliable sources independent of the subject". PS: virtual in the sense of virtuality doesn't have anything to do with possession or lack of virtues in the moral sense. Use of virtual as a synonym of virtuous is obsolete, probably since at least the 19th century. But you likely already know that and were joking; it's hard to tell in a text-only medium. PPS: The Economist Style Guide was apparently confusingly renamed for its 12th ed. in 2023 [5].  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  10:04, 23 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]
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