Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (capitalization)

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[edit] Advice needed

I need advice on the title of an article. Currently the article is called "Invader Zim" (it's a TV programme). The official title is "Invader ZIM". Would using the fully capitalised official name in the title be appropriate for Wikipedia? ●BillPP (talk|contribs) 02:54, 14 May 2007 (UTC)

Yes of course, you wouldn't spell Manu Ginóbili as Manu Ginobili because ´ doesn't appear in English, you do it because you spell things like names in the matter in which they are spelt.T ALK•QRC2006•¢ʘñ†®¡ß§ 21:00, 27 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] To Be or Not to Be

Hi all. The example link on the project page to To Be or Not to Be leads to a disambiguation page. I would imagine it's supposed to point to one of the two films and not the soliloquy (which uses lowercase per the MoS). I'm not sure which film it is intended to link to though. I have a bias towards the Mel Brooks version which I've always thought was much funnier. Cheers! —Elipongo (Talk contribs) 14:22, 23 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Prepositions five letters or longer within film titles

The convention in its current version provides that articles, prepositions, and conjunctions within the title of “books, films, and other works” are not capitalized. However, the current version of Wikipedia:Naming conventions (films) says that articles, prepositions, and conjunctions are not capitalized if they are “shorter than five letters”. This is an apparent inconsistency because long prepositions and conjunctions like ‘through’ and ‘before’ would be capitalized under one convention but not the other. --Mathew5000 21:15, 23 August 2007 (UTC)

Moreover, the word ‘to’ when used as part of the infinitive of a verb is not a preposition. It also is neither an article nor a conjunction. It is simply a grammatical particle. For correctness, the convention should specify that ‘to’ when used as part of an infinitive should not be capitalized (unless it begins the title). Otherwise the examples “To Be or Not to Be” and “Failure to Launch” are inconsistent with the rule as stated. --Mathew5000 21:26, 23 August 2007 (UTC)
Longer prepositions such as "without", "through", and "before" are generally agreed to be capitalized by most parties, AFAIK. Whether or not that was ever stated on this page, I don't know, but clearly the WP:NCF articulated it. Perhaps this should be adopted here (if it wasn't deleted by mistake). Actually, I'm just going to be bold and see what happens... Girolamo Savonarola 20:29, 25 August 2007 (UTC)
I'm confused as to what "generally agreed ... by most parties" is meant to imply in the previous comment. My copy of The Chicago Manual of Style (14th ed.) notes in 7.127 (pp.282–283):
Articles (a, an, the), coordinating conjunctions (and, but, or, for, nor), and prepositions, regardless of length, are lowercased unless they are the first or last word of the title or subtitle.
(the bold is mine). My copy of MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers (3rd ed.) notes in 2.5.1 (p.50):
Therefore, capitalize nouns, pronouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, and subordinating conjunctions (although, if, because), but not articles (a, an, the), prepositions (e.g., in, to, of, between) ...
notice that one of their examples is a seven-letter preposition. Which style guides recommend lowercase only for short prepositions? Alan smithee (talk) 22:49, 18 November 2007 (UTC)
Until just now, ours did... -GTBacchus(talk) 01:00, 19 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Single article

I believe the Associated Press style is to always capitalize a single article when printed in title case when no other articles or prepositions are present, for example:

  • Ride A Cable Car Today (correct)
  • Ride a Cable Car Today (incorrect)

I notice that the convention gives the example of "A New Kind of Science", which would be compliant with AP style, as I believe the "capitalize single articles" rule only applies to articles, and would not apply to "of," of course.  :)

I ask because I moved Why I Am Not a Christian to Why I Am Not A Christian earlier, a move which was shortly thereafter reverted, citing WP:NAME, although WP:CAPS seems not to address single articles one way or the other.   justen   00:47, 30 August 2007 (UTC)

When you say ‘single article’ do you mean ‘single-letter article’? In any event, Why I Am Not a Christian is correct capitalization for Wikipedia. It is stated explicitly in WP:CAPS that an article shorter than five letters is not capitalized (unless it is the first word in the title). That is standard for both English and American usage. --Mathew5000 06:28, 30 August 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Is there any precedent, policy, or guideline related to subpages?

Is there any precedent, policy, or guideline related to subpages here or on meta? Thanks. --Emesee 03:19, 30 August 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Magazine/newspaper/journal article titles

Am I correct that titles of newspaper, magazine, and journal articles should be capitalized as an ordinary sentence, and not considered a "work" in the current guideline:

"In general, each word in titles of books, films, and other works take an initial capital...."

If so, is mentioning that somewhere on this page appropriate, perhaps at the end of the paragraph quoted above? If there is no consensus opinion, maybe it could say that at the end of the paragraph. Or is this the wrong page to advise on capitalization of article tites?

-Agyle 21:46, 2 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Contractions

Do contractions of conjunctions still count as conjunctions or should they be treated as proper nouns? For example, the "n" in Bone Thugs-n-Harmony is a contraction for either "in" or "and". I think it should be uncapitalised, but maybe others think otherwise? Spellcast (talk) 20:50, 28 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Dynasties

Among the articles about a specific dynasty more have a name with "Dynasty" using a capital "D" (Ahom Dynasty, Arghun Dynasty, Arsacid Dynasty, Artaxiad Dynasty, Askiya Dynasty, ...) than use a lower-case "d" (Afsharid dynasty, Aftasid dynasty, Antipatrid dynasty, Ardennes-Verdun dynasty, Argead dynasty, ...).

Is there a justification for this widespread use of capitalized "Dynasty", such as "Ahom Dynasty" being considered a proper name? Which should have the preference:

  1. Rename "Ahom Dynasty" etcetera to "Ahom dynasty" etc.
  2. Rename "Afsharid dynasty" etcetera to "Afsharid Dynasty" etc.
  3. Leave it to the discretion of the article creators, just as for American vs. British spelling.

70.137.187.239 (talk) 06:16, 28 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Why capitalize first word only for titles of articles?

Can someone explain to me the rationale behind the convention of capitalizing only the first letter of articles?

If it is true that "adherence to conventions widely used in the genre are critically important to credibility" Wikipedia should not be using a convention that is used nowhere else. I don't know about anyone else, but every time I see an article title that follows this quirky convention I think that some semi-literate computer nerd named the article. (-;

Thanks in advance from a WP newbie!

Webbbbbbber (talk) 23:41, 22 February 2008 (UTC)

It seems to be a hold-over from the early days of Wikipedia:
Some article titles are not displayed correctly because of limitations in the original MediaWiki software, e.g. the first character is forced to be upper case.
I don't know why the limitations of the original software continue to restrict the naming of Wikipedia articles today. It seems that an article name at Wiktionary starts with a lower case letter unless the name is a proper noun. I don't know how or why the two wiki systems differ. -Ac44ck (talk) 08:20, 1 March 2008 (UTC)
See the mainspace article Capitalization#Headings_and_publication_titles, particularly the discussion of "sentence case", and the advantages described for it. Jheald (talk) 19:24, 26 March 2008 (UTC)
Relevant discussion initiated between me and Jheald over here. Lord Sesshomaru (talk • edits) 19:37, 26 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Page names that only differ by capitalization

It seems like a bad idea to me that page names may differ only by the tweaking of a single character.

These are confusingly similar:

also

Unless one is reading with extraordinary care, it can be easy to overlook the differences in the examples above.

Terseness takes precedence over readability when conservation of disk space is a higher priority than readability. It doesn't appear to me that terseness generally takes precedence over readability in Wikipedia. Making page titles easy to confuse by virtue of being terse seems inconsistent with the verbosity elsewhere.

These seem like better titles to me:

  • Blackberry (disambiguation)
  • Blackberry (fruit)
  • BlackBerry (mobile device)
  • Santa Lucia (disambiguation)
  • Santa Lucia (song)
  • Santa Lucia (places)

-Ac44ck (talk) 07:39, 1 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Request for comment

Should all conjunctions and prepositions in the title of a published work be lowercased, regardless of their length? – Cyrus XIII (talk) 00:33, 10 March 2008 (UTC)

Length of what? Length of the title or length of the conjunction? Can you give examples of situations where this issue would or would not arise based on length? -Ac44ck (talk) 02:58, 10 March 2008 (UTC)
Good point, it would be the length of the conjunction (I have adjusted the initial RfC description to address that ambiguity). To provide further context:
When dealing with titles of published works (i.e. books, films, music albums, etc.) Wikipedia editors currently appear to favor uppercasing conjunctions of five letters and longer (like "over" and "through"). Subsequently, such a five-letter-clause of sorts was added to this guideline as well as the style guide of several WikiProjects (i.e. Albums and Films). An editor recently challenged the rule here and on aforementioned other guides and since an omission of it, while subtle, would affect quite a lot of articles, I considered broad input to be appropriate.
Personally, I would favor to keep the clause, as it provides a more consistent typeface and is also not unheard of in professional style guides. Capitalizing such conjunctions as a principle has little bearing on matters of verifiability and neutrality and as such, this is, to me, a case where our rules should remain descriptive of what appears to be the most common approach among Wikipedia editors, rather than being top-down prescriptive. – Cyrus XIII (talk) 09:05, 10 March 2008 (UTC)
Shouldn't prepositions be addressed as well? I was taught to capitalize the first and last words of the title. All other words are capitalized except for "a", "an", "the", and conjunctions and prepositions of four letters or fewer. I'll see if I can turn up a source.
Examples
  • The Bridge on the River Kwai
  • Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End (although "At" is a short preposition, it is the first word in the subtitle)
  • A River Runs Through It ("Through" is a preposition greater than four letters)

Jim Dunning | talk 00:08, 13 March 2008 (UTC)
I agree, this also concerns prepositions. And the example you list correspond with the way I've been formatting titles as well. – Cyrus XIII (talk) 09:56, 15 March 2008 (UTC)
I'm not sure what is meant by a "(more) consistent typeface" — could you please elaborate, Cyrus XIII? While I agree that these capitalization issues will likely not have much bearing on matters of verifiability and neutrality, etc., why should the rules be descriptive? You present the case that determining capitalization based on length is "not unheard of in professional style guides" (and cite a book called The Copyeditor's Handbook) — how is the support of one (in my opinion) lesser-known book of any significance compared to the support of giants such as The Chicago Manual of Style or The MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers? As noted above ...
My copy of The Chicago Manual of Style (14th ed.) notes in 7.127 (pp.282–283):
Articles (a, an, the), coordinating conjunctions (and, but, or, for, nor), and prepositions, regardless of length, are lowercased unless they are the first or last word of the title or subtitle.
(the bold is mine). My copy of MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers (3rd ed.) notes in 2.5.1 (p.50):
Therefore, capitalize nouns, pronouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, and subordinating conjunctions (although, if, because), but not articles (a, an, the), prepositions (e.g., in, to, of, between) ...
notice that one of their examples is a seven-letter preposition. Alan smithee (talk) 04:03, 16 March 2008 (UTC)
"More consistent" in the sense that the obvious distinction between (grammatically) important and less important words is complemented by one that basically goes like "long words get capitalized, short words don't". Such an amendment is obviously based on aesthetics, but the same may be said about the notion of rendering titles differently than regular prose in the first place. And there are obviously style guides and high-profile publications that opt for that approach (the New York Times for example, as a quick search of the word "through" in the nytimes.com archive shows).
Regarding descriptivism vs. prescriptivism: Our policies and guidelines are shaped by community consensus - their purpose is merely to describe what happens down in the trenches and a (prescriptive) top-to-bottom approach is only necessary when the few basic principles of Wikipedia are concerned, as these, naturally, have to remain non-negotiable. (Note that I'm more or less quoting an older talk page comment made by another, more experienced editor here. The related discussion turned out rather interesting, look it up when you have the time.) Hence I believe that what happened in the trenches in this particular case is that Wikipedia editors, by and large, found the approach to capitalize long prepositions and conjunctions more appealing and subsequently, it was added to this and various other pages of our own Manual of Style. We always have and certainly will be looking at the style guides you quoted, for inspiration, but if the Wikipedia community deems an approach that differs from these manuals appropriate for its own work, then this is how it goes down. – Cyrus XIII (talk) 12:26, 20 March 2008 (UTC)
I still don't see the "long words get capitalized, short words don't" approach as "more consistent" in any sense, though I certainly concur that at least one (seemingly minor) style guide and one of the world's most respected newspapers may use that approach (for prepositions). Of course, Wikipedia is not a newspaper.
For what it's worth, I'm surprised Occam's razor hasn't been mentioned — adding the length criterion seems like unnecessary complication.
It seems, however, that your primary point is that what is "right" in some abstract (perhaps even philosophical) sense is not what is relevant, but what is relevant is what the Wikipedia community as a whole wants. (If I'm mistaken, and that's not essentially your primary point, please correct me.) I'm still pretty new to Wikipedia, so clearing this up is very helpful — thank you.
Now how do we know what the Wikipedia community as a whole wants?
The only discussion that I've seen beyond the two of us is Ac44ck's short clarification, Jim Dunning's short comment, and a limited discussion under Wikipedia_talk:Naming_conventions_(capitalization)#Prepositions_five_letters_or_longer_within_film_titles — these few Wikipedians presumably make up only a small fraction of the Wikipedia community. Alan smithee (talk) 03:18, 1 April 2008 (UTC)
What is the next step, now that RFC bot has removed the RFC? Alan smithee (talk) 18:25, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] First word nominal prefixes

Question: what is the appropriate capitalization if the first word of the article title is a nominal prefix that is ususally not capitalised?

For example, without capitals: de Casteljau's algorithm, de Broglie hypothesis, de Gaulle family, de Havilland Albatross

With capitals: Von Neumann entropy, Van der Waals force, De Boor's algorithm, De Rham cohomology, Von Mises–Fisher distribution

My view would be that since the first word of an article title is like the first word of a sentence, which is capitalised, so capitalization of the prefix is correct. Sesshomaru (talk · contribs) on the other hand thinks lower case (which may be how such things are sometimes indexed at the back of books?)

Either way, definitive guidance would be appreciated; and perhaps should be added to the guidelines? Jheald (talk) 19:51, 26 March 2008 (UTC)

Uh, my name is User:Sesshomaru. The lord part is just an addition in my signature. Lord Sesshomaru (talk • edits) 19:53, 26 March 2008 (UTC)
Okay. Jheald (talk) 19:56, 26 March 2008 (UTC)

See also: articles starting with De, articles starting with Von. Jheald (talk) 11:45, 1 April 2008 (UTC)

+ some discussion at Talk:de Havilland. Jheald (talk) 11:56, 1 April 2008 (UTC)

Any thoughts from anybody? Jheald (talk) 10:25, 23 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Capitalization of contractions of long conjunctions/prepositions?

I know that prepositions and conjunctions under five letters aren't capitalized in works like books or movies. However, would contractions of these long words not be capitalized? For example, should No Life 'Til Leather be changed to No Life 'til Leather? (until is the preposition in this case, and now it's shortened to 'til which is shorter than five letters) Another example is a song on Lou Gramm's album Ready or Not, a song called "Arrow Thru Your Heart". Since the preposition "through" is now shortened to the four-letter "thru", should it be spelled "Arrow thru Your Heart"? Thanks for your input. Xnux the Echidna 02:16, 9 June 2008 (UTC)