Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Capital letters/Archive 22

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Archive 20

RFC for multiple letter capitalisations in the MoS

Latest comment: 8 years ago36 comments17 people in discussion

The following discussion is an archived record of a request for comment. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this discussion. A summary of the conclusions reached follows.

Consensus is (1) to use the capitalization found in a clear and incontrovertible preponderance of usage in reliable sources, and (2) to try to rephrase sentences so they don't start with a term beginning with a lower case letter. Opinions are split on what to do if there isn't a clear and incontrovertible preponderance of usage in reliable sources (whether to use the trademark case or sentence case and common English usage), but MOS:TMRULES is pretty clear that we should stick to our usual sentence case and common English usage in that case, rather than follow the usage of trademark holders. --GRuban (talk) 20:07, 17 March 2016 (UTC)

The Wikipedia Manual of Style does not currently have any solid guidelines on how to capitalise trademarks with multiple capital letters, such as 'tvOS', 'watchOS', 'webOS', etc. The only guidelines I can find currently are:

Editors are divided over which forms to use, e.g. whether to use 'exampleOS', 'ExampleOS' or 'EXAMPLEOS' and whether to use different forms at the start of sentences, etc. The Manual of Style needs some guideline to use because the current ones do not give a rule to follow for this situation. Thanks, Tom29739 (talk) 15:18, 31 January 2016 (UTC).

(Presumably "how to capitalise trademarks with multiple capital letters" should be "with multiple leading lower-case letters", e.g. the 't' and 'v' in "tvOS", the 'w'/'a'/'t'/'c'/'h' in "watchOS", and the 'w'/'e'/'b' in "webOS".) Guy Harris (talk) 20:31, 2 February 2016 (UTC)

Question – If this is a real problem, where can we find examples of cases that have been argued? If they're being settled satisfactorily, maybe we don't really need to say anything in the MOS? Dicklyon (talk) 16:07, 31 January 2016 (UTC)
Is this really an issue? Trademarks are specifically registered, so if the trademark is, for example, "FiOS," then that's how we should write it. Similarly, we should respect the registered capitalization at the beginning of a sentence; Apple products come to mind immediately. — Jkudlick • t • c • s 16:26, 31 January 2016 (UTC)

@Dicklyon:Examples of cases that have been argued are at tvOS, watchOS and Apple TV. Tom29739 (talk) 17:18, 31 January 2016 (UTC)

Oppose – catering to the whimsies of trademarks^® beyond the first letter. I even object to CamelCased tradenames. Cheers! {{u|Checkingfax}} {Talk} 17:59, 31 January 2016 (UTC)

This isn't yet a proposal, so it's not being voted on, and presumably Oppose means "I think that if the policy is made to explicitly address trademarks such as "tvOS", it shouldn't allow "tvOS" -" without saying anything about, for example, "TvOS" vs. "TVOS". Guy Harris (talk) 18:54, 31 January 2016 (UTC)

I think that "tvOS" etc. should be allowed, i.e. allow them to be capitalized the same way the vendor does, if that's become common usage. I think "TvOS" looks odd and "TVOS" looks very odd. For capitalization when at the beginning of the sentence, I'd say follow Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Trademarks#Trademarks that begin with a lowercase letter, i.e. try not to put the trademark at the beginning of a sentence. Guy Harris (talk) 19:02, 31 January 2016 (UTC)

Opinion – OK, now that we know what it's about, I am forming an opinion. We usually start trademarks with a capital letter, and don't user other caps except for initialisms (and sometime CamelCase). But we sometimes allow for initial lowercase, like in k.d. lang (which is her registered tradeamark). The initial lowercase is often there to indicate reading as a letter, as opposed to as a part of a work, as in eBay, iPod. In the case of WatchOS, no initial cap is needed, and in fact some book sources do capitalize it, so we're choosing from among existing styles if we do, too (for title and sentence initial, or maybe always). So that leaves tvOS; it's a funny case, being pronounced letters but not quite an initialism; "tv" is not like "watch", an initial word, since "TV" for television would normally be in caps. So "TVOS" would suggest the correct pronunciation as letters, but if all the sources use "tvOS", I'd say that's OK. It shouts less than TVOS, and suggests a parse as an OS for a TV. If we go with tvOS, I would never capitalize it; like eBay and k.d. lang in that respect. That's what I'm thinking at present, at least. It's not clear the MOS needs to have more on this, though. Also WT:MOSTM might be the right place for the discussion, since it's more about trademarks than about general caps guidelines. Dicklyon (talk) 01:12, 1 February 2016 (UTC)
- Addendum: I don't find any examples on apple.com of staring a sentence with tvOS. If we are to "follow the vendors" (not a great idea in general), we ought to at least follow this example of not starting a sentence with a lowercase trademark. Dicklyon (talk) 05:55, 2 February 2016 (UTC)

Match the vendor's capitalization, except where it can be shown that this isn't generally done in most sources. עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 06:07, 1 February 2016 (UTC)

I'd extend the iPod rule to tvOS but not allow watchOS or any other capitalization exception for things like this that start with a complete word. If we ever encounter a situation with a lowercase-long-abbrevation-prefix we can address it at that time; certainly something that is marketed as like aarpOS or noaaTV would be a little more problematic. AgnosticAphid talk 19:25, 1 February 2016 (UTC)

IFF there's a clear and incontravertible preponderance of notable sources giving a particular rendering, go with that (of course; otherwise the reader will possibly be confused by seeing an unfamiliar letter sequence). Otherwise, use our normal style guides (proper nouns start with a capital and are lower case after that and so forth). What the legal trademark is, or what the trademark owner prefers, is absolutely and utterly no concern of ours. (I believe that this is pretty much our de facto rule; thus you see here that everyone writes "iPod" and no one writes "Ipod" or any other scheme, thus we use "iPod"; but only entities that have established a reasonably large corpus of references and have the references mostly using their capitalization scheme get this treatment. Obscure entities doesn't, and entities that have failed to clearly establish their desired scheme as that which third parties use also don't.) Herostratus (talk) 20:20, 1 February 2016 (UTC)
Oppose extending the one-letter rule. I'll just copy-paste what I said in the original discussion above (and there was no need to fork out an RfC while that discussion was still active):

Reputable sources are not consistent on this, MoS doesn't toe the party line of any single style guide, and WP is not written in news style but academic style, so we're unlikely to import "rules" from journalism style guides if they don't agree with more academic ones. Chicago seems to have the same approach we do – don't let your head asplode about it if it's at the start of a sentence, but rewrite to avoid – but want to generalize it much farther than MoS does, to all trademarks, while MoS wants it only for one-letter ones. We have a right to come to that consensus. The existence of a handful of things like "tvOS" that don't quite qualify under this rule, can simply be WP:IAR exceptions. It is correct that we don't want something like "supermagicOS"; then we're wandering into MOS:TM conflict. The only way we'd accept something like that is if, as with Deadmau5, reliable sources overwhelmingly consistently use the stylized version. (That's also a valid reason to use "tvOS"; I'm skeptical more than a handful of sources call it "TvOS" except where their stylebooks force them to at the beginning of a sentence, or that more than few, unfamiliar with the subject, call it "TVOS".)
Short version: Just rewrite to avoid beginning sentences with something like "watchOS is ...", so WP doesn't look like it's composed from teenagers' text messages. We need no new rule here. — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼ 03:17, 2 February 2016 (UTC)

— SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼ 03:35, 2 February 2016 (UTC)
It's pretty simple. Use the trademark name in the title and follow normal capitalization in article text. So, tvOS in title and when the name is directly after periods, use TvOS (but you ideally shouldn't start a sentence with a trademark name). --117.194.236.244 (talk) 06:01, 2 February 2016 (UTC)
- The "simple" theory would seem to be in conflict with the idea that titles are in sentence case. Dicklyon (talk) 06:19, 2 February 2016 (UTC)
Use common name would seem to apply, and if the one is referring to a proper name the trademarked goods, one uses the trademarked name, umlauts, capitalization, and misspellings/English variations intact (which is what we do with any other proper names, of which trademarks are a subset). For example, an article using American English referencing a certain political party in Britain will insert the very un-American "u" and call it the Labour Party. Similarly, Th. Schneider, we use the "Th." abbreviation which is French, rather than the normal English abbreviation of "T." We use Ph.D. not Ph.d. or some other formulation. Carlossuarez46 (talk) 17:45, 4 February 2016 (UTC)
WP:COMMONNAME does not and never has applied to typographic stylizations (Alien³ vs. Alien 3), only what the unstyled name is (Alien 3 vs. Alien Three or Alien III). Style is an MoS matter. MoS (per MOS:TM) allows for a handful of "do not mimic trademark stylizations" exceptions where RS usage overwhelmingly prefers the stylized version (iPod, eBay, Deadmau5, but not "P!nk", "facebook", or TIME); part of the cost of that concession is "do not write mangled sentences that begin with a lower-case letter." WP:COMMONNAME is uninvolved in any way except in article titling of notable subjects (which thus also influences their treatment in prose). For something non-notable (or something notable and which is not given overwhelmingly consistent treatment in RS), it's all MOS:CAPS and MOS:TM. The other cases you're comparing are not actually comparable. It's Th. Schneider because the other language's rules are different, not because it's a trademark. It's Labour Party because WP:ENGVAR doesn't allow us to force American spelling on British subjects. They're different rules, that in some selected examples accidentally have superficially similar results sometimes. There is no other language or dialect in which "exampleOS" is a grammatical rule that would be violated by normalizing it to "ExampleOS". There are a very large number of trademarks stylized with lower case at the start or throughout (cf. "facebook" again), but we don't treat them that way here. WP:COMMONNAME (which is based on simple majority use in RS) tells us what the name is: Is it "Facebook" or "Face-Books" or "Book of Facing"? MOS:TM and MOS:CAPS say "OK, it's 'Facebook', and it's trademark-styled 'facebook'. Do virtually all RS style it that way? No? Then WP doesn't either. That TM analysis is why we do have Deadmau5 and iPod and do not have "TIME" magazine or the singer "P!nk". — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼ 09:32, 7 February 2016 (UTC)
...exceptions where RS usage overwhelmingly prefers the stylized version ...
In other words, WP:COMMONNAME does apply to stylization, but requires that we look at usage across all WP:RS and not merely the trademark holder. — $Llywelyn II$ 15:34, 10 February 2016 (UTC)
No, "in other words" both MOS:CAPS and MOS:TM have provisions for following what sources do stylistically, if virtually all of them do it (across all genres, fields, registers, dialects, etc.), and this has nothing to do with COMMONNAME at all, which simply incidentally has similar provisions for deciding whether a name is "Johnson", "Johanssen" or "Rodriguez" based on what the sources say. All of our major policies and guidelines have provisions relating to reliable sourcing; that doesn't magically make them all the same provision. — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼ 20:28, 21 February 2016 (UTC)
Use the variation most commonly found in reliable sources: I see absolutely no reason (that is not just straight-forward, and frankly neurotic, linguistic prescriptivism) why we would not follow WP:COMMONNAME principles in this instance. Certainly proper names of individuals vary considerably with regard to where capitalization is employed, owning to cultural variation, and we don't second-guess those based on some abstract and non-empirical sense of propriety. And this isn't just a matter of consumer products that use atypical orthography for branding purposes; there are any number of technical topics (including some associated with trademarks) which employ acronyms or variations on scientific shorthand which would be confused by using another approach here. For the sake of the accuracy of our content, the ability of our readers to find and recognize it without issue, and the general principle of WP:Neutral point of view, we ought to be using the most common spelling/orthographic conventions associated with any topic in WP:reliable sources--be it a person, a product, or a gene. Attempting to make all of the disparate topics that appear on this project consistent our expectations of what makes for "proper English" is non-sensical for the purposes of encyclopedia building and obviously against numerous major content guidelines adopted by this community. Snow let's rap 01:31, 6 February 2016 (UTC)
— SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼ 18:27, 6 February 2016 (UTC)
Sentence case Proper nouns have been starting sentences forever, and they are capitalized. Re-writing the sentences to avoid beginning them with proper nouns seems convoluted to me and unnecessarily bows to the proper noun (and company) in question. As for the few proper nouns that are so famous that any capitalization variation risks stunning the audience: The list is so short that I think they can be dealt with on an individual basis. "Ipod" (or, possibly, "IPod") may look ghastly to some (I include myself) compared to "iPod", but it started a sentence, and it's considerably shorter to leave iPod as the opener than concoct a roundabout to avoid it. Fdssdf (talk) 05:23, 6 February 2016 (UTC)
There's no "convolution" or "roundabout" involved in writing "The iPod is..." instead of "[I|i]Pods are...", anyway. There is no showing by anyone that writing around this is difficult or problematic in any way. If anyone objects to "IPod" as somehow unconscionable, they can just tweak the sentence to not start with "iPod". — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼ 18:27, 6 February 2016 (UTC)

I agree that "convolution" approaches hyperbole. However, I stand by my dubbing it "roundabout": Simply dropping in an article to the beginning will pose problems later in many constructs, and additional, yet minor, changes will be necessary. Do we really want to create all this added work if this RfC becomes something more concrete within the MoS? Cheers. Fdssdf (talk) 17:12, 7 February 2016 (UTC)

Follow the reliable sources as a natural extension of WP:COMMONNAME. As Snow Rise said above " Attempting to make all of the disparate topics that appear on this project consistent our expectations of what makes for 'proper English' is non-sensical for the purposes of encyclopedia building and obviously against numerous major content guidelines adopted by this community." Couldn't have said it better myself. Calidum T|C 19:01, 6 February 2016 (UTC)
- Which reliable sources for what? Do you mean reliable sources on English usage, or you do mean topical sources like entertainment industry magazines in favor of weird capitalization and other stylization because they do whatever the labels/studios want them to do?
  Note to any closer who comes along before this expires into the archives: See thread below on "like" for a much larger discussion of the same central issue. — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼ 19:41, 10 February 2016 (UTC) Updated: 20:28, 21 February 2016 (UTC)
Use common English usage. This will be the most easily understood form, and it avoids the constant rule creep characteristic of MOS. Nyttend (talk) 00:34, 7 February 2016 (UTC)

Extended discussion

@Snow Rise: There's no challenge in writing "The iPod is..." instead of "[I|i]Pods are...". It's far more important that readers be able parse our sentences correctly than they be presented with the exact typography most common for a trademark, especially when most times they'll either already be at the trademark's article, or it will be linked. English actually does "second-guess" capitalization in precisely the manner you object to; all major style guides say that with a surnamed like "di Nunzio" to write it as "Di Nunzio" if you begin a sentence with it. If one continues to object to this, then rewrite to avoid beginning the sentence with it. It's really that simple. MOS has nothing to do with PoV notions of what is "proper" English, on what is expected English in a formal writing register, by an audience that includes millions of English learners not familiar with every nuance of every writing style, including tech journalism's fondness for sentence beginning with thing like "iPods are..." And WP:COMMONNAME does not apply to typographic stylization anyway; see above. — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼ 18:27, 6 February 2016 (UTC)

SMcCandlish, I think you've read quite a bit more into my comments than was stated in them. The question of the RfC, as I read it, inquires first and primarily as to which elements of a word we capitalize, all things being equal. I did not say (and did not mean to imply) that we should preserve the lower-case at the beginning of a sentence or in other grammatical/syntactic contexts where the application of a capital is generally expected under descriptive rules. I was only speaking to the fact that forcing prescriptive orthographic conventions on every instance of every branded/trademakred word is broadly against our community consensus on following the sources in how we present our content. I tend to agree that the easiest way around this issue in the context of, say the beginning of a sentence, is to employ wording that moves the noun out of sentence-initial position, provided it doesn't create its own kind of semantic or stylistic issues in doing so; so, to borrow your example, "The iPod" vs. "IPods", the latter of which would clash with a convention likely to be employed elsewhere in the article. In instances where the word-initial position cannot be avoided (I can't think of any examples where that would absolutely be the case, but I imagine they might arise), editors will just have to use their best judgement as to which consideration is most important, but I'd personally gravitate towards capitalizing the sentence, per the almost universal rule of usage in English. But in any event, the main thrust of my initial comments is that the approach of forcing "iPod" to be rendered as "ipod" or "Ipod" everywhere in articlespace, just to avoid this discontinuity, is by far more problematic and inconsistent with our content guidelines, for the reasons discussed above. Snow ^{let's rap} 23:12, 6 February 2016 (UTC)

@Snow Rise: You're right, I misunderstood the nature of your argument as being the same as that espoused by someone else (i.e., that we really should begin a sentence with "iPods are..."). To explore some this stuff in more detail: When it comes to the broader question of "should we call it watchOS, WatchOS, Watchos, WATCHOS, watchos, Watch-OS, etc., for any notable topic that would have been a WP:COMMONNAME-filtuered-through-MOS:TM argument, but one that is already over; that got decided at the article title level already and we have no reason to title the article one way then switch to a different spelling in prose. MOS:TM can come into play at that stage, as when a trademark is styled in all-caps but is not an acronym, we lower-case it, including in our article title, Time (magazine) being the canonical example).

For any non-notable topic (like a minor product from a notable company), the entire problem is that insufficient reliable, independent sources exist (that's the definition of non-notable), so COMMONNAME is never in play, since it's also tied to sources, and a non-notable thing doesn't trigger any article naming matters to begin with, since it will not have an article. That leaves us nothing to go on but MOS:TM and MOS:CAPS, and we wouldn't run with any weird stylization, much less violate basic English grammar rules to do it. If Microsoft includes some non-notable timer app in Windows 11 and its splash screen reads "Windows egg timer", "WINDOWS EGG TIMER" or "wINDOWS eGGtIMER" we wouldn't render it that way. (We'd take "Windows EggTimer" at face value, because common sense tells us that "studly caps" camelcasing is demonstrably conventional in software naming; i.e. that wouldn't be an implausible styling and would almost certainly be reflected in RS if any ever bothered to write about this trivial app).

Anyway, I, too, can't think of any sentence-initial position for something that cannot practically be reworded, except in a quotation. Even at the start of an article; we are not abound to use something like "qOS is an operating system for smartphones released by Foobarco in 2016", when we can write "Foobarco qOS is an operating system for smartphones, released in 2016". [shrug]

For the broader question, "watchOS" is already an "overwhelming use in sources" matter, so it's exempt from MOS:CAPS / MOS:TM. If some new flavor of Linux comes out next month with vendor styling as "existentialismOS", we'd capitalize the initial E per standard treatment of proper names, until such time that it was demonstrable that virtually all independent, secondary RS called it "existentialismOS". This frequently comes up with stylization of TV show titles and the like (an outlying case might be something like xyzFoo where xyz is an acronym, and Foo some word or fragment. It would be conventional to write that as "XYZfoo" or maybe "XYZFoo", but people might go along with "xyzFoo" on a WP:IAR basis. I remain skeptical because the potential for confusion is too high. If I release a device that auto-blocks phone calls from American companies and call it "usaBlock", I wouldn't expect many people in the real world to take that stylization very seriously. — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼ 08:55, 7 February 2016 (UTC)

Followup note: In the course of researching the capitalization-of-prepositions-in-titles issue, I've necessarily read most of the capitalization sections in most style guides in print. I have found zero that support the notion of beginning a sentence with "iPhones are ...". Every single one of them that addressed the issue says to start a sentence with "iPhones are...", and to hell with the trademark holder's expectations. There's a general consensus in the professional writing world that trademark holders do not also hold writers and publishers hostage with unreasonable demands. I cannot think of a rational reason that MoS would diverge from how the real world does things on this matter. There is no technical or other WP-internal rationale for us part ways with all other style guides. There's an imaginary and mistaken one only, the notion that WP:COMMONNAME is a stylization policy. It's not, and never has been. I feel strongly that MoS should have the same "always begin a sentence with a capital letter" rule.
Next, while there was fairly widespread support for "iPad", etc. (I saw at least 5 style guides address this), I did not see a single one that addressed cases like "watchOS". Permitting it (but not at the beginning of a sentence) would be consistent with the rationales that some of them gave (not all of them gave one) to do what the "official name" does within reason, and it's consistent with the down style advocated by many modern style guides (same as MOS:CAPS: Do not capitalize without reason or when in doubt, and lowercase by default; the stance of the trademark holder injects doubt, so default to lower case. What no style guides (that I encountered, which is a lot of them) would accept is "SONY" for "Sony"; the all-capping is a form of marketing/PR "screaming for attention" and should not be kowtowed to by any responsible writer. In WP terms, it's a serious WP:NPOV problem. Most of the style guides that addressed it will also accept meaningful camelcase ("AirBnB") but not random b.s., like the jumbling in eBay's old logo ("ebaY", much less "e_b^aY"), as well as variant handling of word-acronyms ("NORAD" but "Anzac"). I could not find a single one that would support the use of non-English character substitutions like "Macy^★s" or "ToysЯus". None of them addressed any cases like "Deadmau5", and arguably we have arrived at a WP-internal consensus that in rare cases (of near-universal support in RS) this is okay since the character substitution isn't from outside the normal keyboard characters. As usual, I don't think any particular external style guide or subset of them dictates what MoS and WP do, but we always consider what the preponderance of them are doing when deciding what MoS and WP should do. MOS appears to be consistent with mainstream style guides on these matters, other than we aren't addressing the "start a sentence with a capital letter" matter. — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼ 18:20, 19 February 2016 (UTC)
Updated: I found one house style guide, that of BuzzFeed, that supports beginning a sentence with something like "eBay says...", and even is advises to write around such a construction. (Not that some website's internal stylesheet is really relevant; it's not a source that people refer to and rely on the real world, it's just WP:PRIMARY for one company's individual choice in this regard. — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼ 20:28, 21 February 2016 (UTC)
Opening discussion at WP:AN/RFC. Tom29739 ^[talk] 17:13, 2 March 2016 (UTC).

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Deputy Lieutenant

Latest comment: 8 years ago6 comments3 people in discussion

This job is almost always capitalized throughout WP. Is that an error that some editor (probably me) should fix, or should WP:JOBTITLES list it as an exception? It seems to me that if president, king and pope are not capitalized when used generically, then deputy lieutenant should not be capitalized, either. Or is this some idiomatic British thing that American editors need to be aware of? Chris the speller ^yack 03:00, 28 March 2016 (UTC)

Isn't this usually in the context of the UK title of Deputy Lieutenant rather than any old lieutenant? Compare "the Queen" (typically when referring to HM Queen Elizabeth) rather than any old (generic) queen? BushelCandle (talk) 03:36, 28 March 2016 (UTC)

Yes, it is a UK title, but in WP is almost never used to refer to a specific and obvious person, so it does not compare to "the Queen". Chris the speller ^yack 04:42, 28 March 2016 (UTC)

I think you're right then, it's some quaint Britisher thing like Lord Lieutenant or Lieutenant Governor. BushelCandle (talk) 06:11, 28 March 2016 (UTC)

No, I don't think lieutenant governor needs capitalization, but whatever applies to deputy lieutenant might also apply to lord lieutenant and gentleman usher. But it will not sit well with some people to say that lieutenant governor should be capitalized in UK articles but not in US articles. I have not been convinced that any of these should be always capitalized. Chris the speller ^yack 14:02, 28 March 2016 (UTC)

Should be lower case like all other job titles and government appointments if not used directly with the person's name. "It's different if it's a UK government position" is just more specialized-style fallacy. — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼ 18:45, 28 March 2016 (UTC)

Composition titles detailia

Latest comment: 8 years ago12 comments5 people in discussion

Much of WP:Manual of Style/Capital letters#Composition titles should merge into WP:Manual of Style/Titles#Capitalization, with just a summary of key points being retained at MOSCAPS, and an even more compressed version at the main MOS page. We have these topical subpages for the express purpose of serving as "for more information" loci, with the main MoS being lean and easy to absorb, and the subpages being focused on particular needs. We haven't done a cleanup of this sort in several years, and this is a good a place as any to start, because the handling-of-titles advice is scattered over at least 4 different MoS pages, and should be consolidated into the one that is supposed to be devoted to it, with the others just cross-referencing it. — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼ 21:42, 19 February 2016 (UTC)

But composition titles come up in article text, not just in article titles. I don't see how this proposal makes sense as a way to cover treatment of composition titles more generally. Dicklyon (talk) 05:39, 23 February 2016 (UTC)

@Dicklyon: Neither page is about WP article titles in particular; this is just MoS stuff. Maybe "WP:Manual of Style/Titles" looked like "WP:Article titles"? :-) — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼ 11:25, 25 February 2016 (UTC)

Yes, I see I was misled by that. As usual, you've done your homework carefully. I support the idea now that I understand it. Dicklyon (talk) 15:46, 25 February 2016 (UTC)

Job titles

What are the thoughts on including a paragraph or sentence that addresses actual job titles, esp. corporate positions, which some people seem to think have special status to be capped? Primergrey (talk) 13:03, 22 March 2016 (UTC)

Are you thinking of texts like "Prior to 1902, the Prime Minister sometimes came from the House of Lords"?

Or are you thinking more of different rules for job titles as opposed to titles of high office?--Boson (talk) 14:53, 22 March 2016 (UTC)

I think some guidance on e.g. "He became Prime Minister" v. "He became prime minister" would be nice (I favour the latter, cf. "Prime Minister Smith"). Rothorpe (talk) 15:59, 22 March 2016 (UTC)

Covered at MOS:BIO (it's lowercase if its not in front of the name). Do we need more links to it in here? — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼ 20:30, 22 March 2016 (UTC)

I think the convention is pretty clear for elected or official positions. I was thinking of making it clearer on the subject of things like "chief executive officer", "general manager", "marketing director" etc. Primergrey (talk) 00:29, 23 March 2016 (UTC)

Sure. Same rule, but people get it wrong often, so might as well reinforce it. Especially if the WP:SSF is involved ("US Government Job Titles are always Officially capitalized", "Marine Corps ranks are always capitalize because they're Marines!", etc., etc.). — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼ 03:44, 23 March 2016 (UTC)

I would say the problematic passage that is susceptible to differing interpretations is

"When the correct formal title is treated as a proper name (e.g. King of France; it is correct to write Louis XVI was King of France but Louis XVI was the French king)"

The article Prime Minister of the United Kingdom seems particularly extreme, but capitalization of offices is very widespread.

How do we decide whether the following articles should be moved (and which repetitions of the term within those articles changed)?

At first glance, it looks to me if the actual common practice on Wikipedia is that the office is capitalized when talking of the office itself (particularly when it is the topic of the article) but is usually, though not always, lowercased when it is very obvious that it is being used indefinitely (e.g. in the plural or preceded by an indefinite article).

--Boson (talk) 17:08, 28 March 2016 (UTC)

PS: I would add that there may be some differentiation between

the (capitalized) title (not necessarily the formal, official title) of an office (typically unique in a given context), such as President of the United States and Prime Minister of the United Kingdom – possibly including shortened versions such as "the Prime Minister" when referring to such a unique office
the (lowercased) designation or description of the position or status of a class of non-unique-office–holders, such as justice of the peace
mixed usage for offices that are unique within the context of a particular country, when referring to the title of the office generally; thus we have

lowercased prime minister
capitalized President of the Senate.

--Boson (talk) 00:47, 29 March 2016 (UTC)

Capitalize "Solar Nebula"?

Latest comment: 8 years ago3 comments3 people in discussion

We sometimes say "the solar nebula" when referring to the nebula that the Sun formed from. While "solar nebula" doesn't have its own article, it is used on a lot of pages. Since we capitalize "Solar System", wouldn't we logically capitalize "solar nebula"? --Sir Cumference π 17:11, 4 April 2016 (UTC)

Either "solar" is an adjective to tell us which nebula is being referred to (the one that formed our Sun) or "Solar Nebular" is the name of that nebula. The former seems closer to the mark (is it ever used as a proper name?) so I would keep it all lower case. Dondervogel 2 (talk) 21:13, 4 April 2016 (UTC)

Lowercase. We should follow the usage in the majority of modern astronomy and cosmology texts, which "solar+nebula"&hl=en&as_sdt=0,5 clearly is all-lowercase. Astronomy is conceptualizing the Solar System not as just a solar system but as a place, the system of Sol, our sun (which can also be named the Sun, but not called "a Sun"). A diffuse cloud that existed billions of years ago isn't being conceptualized this way; Sol didn't exist yet. (Analogy: If I build the McCandlish Tower office building on some patch of ground, that spot is not properly referred to retrospectively as "the Future Site of the McCandlish Tower", capitalized like that). If Sol novas and produces another nebula, that we're looking back at from our colony on Kepler-62e, then it would be the Solar Nebula for sure. An alternative term is "the pre-solar nebula" but it is not used very much (despite being more precise and meaningful; our own article prefers it for this reason, I think.) Anyway, I don't know why they don't use "the Solar nebula" (or "the pre-Solar nebula") and "a solar nebula" but they don't, so there we have it. — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼ 03:25, 10 April 2016 (UTC)

Yipes. Now justice of the peace needs to be capitalized if it's in the UK?

Latest comment: 7 years ago68 comments11 people in discussion

After a downcasing of "Justice of the Peace" in London, Chatham and Dover Railway, Mjroots undid it. I posted this on his talk page, and he came up with the bogus claim that it's a proper noun because it is often represented by the letters "JP" and that makes it a proper noun. Here is the exchange:

Please explain why WP:JOBTITLES should not apply to justice of the peace in this article. Chris the speller ^yack 14:08, 28 March 2016 (UTC)

@Chris the speller: It's correct grammar. Where a job title is normally rendered by letters, then the phrase is a Proper Noun and is capitalized. You wouldn't write "queen Elizabeth II", "John Doe, member of parliament" or "Joe Bloggs, member of the european parliament", would you? Same goes for JPs, Sherrifs, High Sherrifs and similar ranks. Mjroots (talk) 16:05, 28 March 2016 (UTC)`

This is directly opposite to the advice given in MOS:CAPSACRS: "Do not apply initial capitals in a full term that is a common noun just because capitals are used in its abbreviation." And now Sheriff, too? Are we going to capitalize every job when it is in a UK-connected article? Chris the speller ^yack 17:21, 28 March 2016 (UTC)

It says "Do not apply initial capitals in a full term that is a common noun just because capitals are used in its abbreviation" (my italics). It does not apply to Proper Nouns. Mjroots (talk) 18:05, 28 March 2016 (UTC)

Could we also consider General Practitioner here, while we're at it? It's lower-cased at the article. But are these "common nouns" or "Proper Nouns"? Or does it not matter? Thanks. Meanwhile, I'll assume that the Chicago guide is the only one that matters to Wikipedia. Martinevans123 (talk) 18:11, 28 March 2016 (UTC)

@Mjroots and Martinevans123: "Justice of the peace" and "general practitioner" are not a proper noun phrases. A good test is to ask whether, while retaining the normal sense of the word or phrase, it's possible to put "a" in front of it. It it is, it can't be a proper noun or noun phrase. "He's a justice of the peace"; "she's a general practitioner"' "I thought she was a queen"; "Joe Bloggs is a member of parliament" – all are common noun phrases by this test. Although some of these are capitalized by convention in some UK publications, they are not capitalized in Wikipedia, which has its own styles. "Queen Elizabeth" is quite different; it's a proper noun phrase and cannot be preceded by "a" while retaining the meaning of the specific person. Peter coxhead (talk) 18:24, 28 March 2016 (UTC)

It's not what I was taught at school and it's very poor grammar. Has Wikipedia abandoned the rules of grammar now? Mjroots (talk) 18:27, 28 March 2016 (UTC)

So that's "the peace" as in general quietness then, is it? And "a justice" as opposed to "an injustice"? Martinevans123 (talk) 18:36, 28 March 2016 (UTC)

Should be lower case like all other job titles and government appointments if not used directly with the person's name. "It's different if it's a UK government position" is just more specialized-style fallacy. — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼ 18:45, 28 March 2016 (UTC)
Thank you for the handy three letter code that I'll keep hidden up my sleeve to confront future heresies. If I were feeling particularly sardonic I'd interpret your answer to mean "Wiki MoS is equally far from common US usage as it is from common UK usage" e.g. [1] and [2]. But I'm sure you will be able to furnish us with the "real life" style guide(s) from which this MoS point has been distilled over the eons of time. Thanks. Martinevans123 (talk) 19:54, 28 March 2016 (UTC)

Loading up an editor with an unrealistic homework assignment is not a good way to reach a consensus. And to find out if "general practitioner" is a proper noun, look it up in a good dictionary. They all list it in lower case, so that's a pretty foolproof way to tell that it's a common noun. Chris the speller ^yack 01:10, 29 March 2016 (UTC)

Not a request, merely a prediction. Some editors appear to relish such opportunities. I don't doubt that justice, peace, general and practitioner can all be common nouns. But, like Mjroots, I was taught something else - that specialist context could confer the status of proper noun. Comforting to know that you have checked "all dictionaries" (although I'm not 100% convinced by your own use above). But it appears that the uk.gov doesn't use any of them. Martinevans123 (talk) 08:01, 29 March 2016 (UTC)

I don't take "assignments" anyway. This point is not actually controversial, and can be found in most style guides. The overcapitalized style is found virtually nowhere but (see if you can guess) journalism style, and it's declining even there. While this is something I can research to a finely detailed level, our article on capitalization in English doesn't seem need much work in this regard right now; it certainly more pressing issues than this question. — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼ 05:44, 2 April 2016 (UTC)

What you and Mjroots (or anybody else) learned in school takes a back seat to reliable sources when it comes to WP style. So does the usage within an industry or within a government; What company does not usually capitalize executive director in its publications? But dictionaries and WP do not need to be so self-aggrandizing or deferential. They know what a common noun is, and use lower case. Chris the speller ^yack 13:48, 29 March 2016 (UTC)

I can’t speak for Mjroots, but of course in Wales we only ever got blank slates, or knots with a silent K. Martinevans123 (talk) 13:56, 29 March 2016 (UTC) p.s. page 542 of my Concise Oxford Dictionary (reprinted 1983) says "JP: abbr. Justice of the Peace."

The minuscule should be used. None of the mentioned terms are proper nouns, per above. RGloucester — ☎ 01:48, 29 March 2016 (UTC)

Is anyone here suggesting that an MP should be termed a member of parliament, all in lower case? If not, why not? I can understand and accept that a GP is a (lower case) general practitioner - it describes the job they do. But, in normal British English usage, a JP is a Justice of the Peace. Why? Because the lower case words "justice of the peace" are, in themselves, difficult to interpret and verge on meaningless. What is "the peace"? What does a "justice" do in relation to "the peace"? The correct job title, in that particular case, uses capital initial letters. Each case will be different - we should not try to impose our view of consistency in British English where it does not exist in reality. There are certain cases where using all lower case should not apply - where, irrespective of how the more general WP guidelines are interpreted, it is simply incorrect to do so. WP:SSF is TL;DR, btw. Ghmyrtle (talk) 08:37, 29 March 2016 (UTC)

Quite agree. I am prepared to accept that general practitioner names an occupation, (like district attorney?), although a specialist one. But Justice of the Peace is not an occupation, but an appointment, similar to Member of Parliament. Of course, we could get round it by using magistrate. Or is it Magistrate? Martinevans123 (talk) 08:52, 29 March 2016 (UTC)

The lower-case version would be "member of Parliament" and "member of the European Parliament", would it not, given that "Parliament" and "European Parliament" are capitalised proper nouns in themselves? "european" is certainly wrong for quite independent reasons. —Nizolan ^(talk) 10:07, 29 March 2016 (UTC)

Is that like Assembly Members? (or should that be "member of the National Assembly for wales"? Martinevans123 (talk) 10:19, 29 March 2016 (UTC)

If they were a member of the assembly committee on wales, perhaps. —Nizolan ^(talk) 10:59, 29 March 2016 (UTC)

Haha. And jimbo probably needs his own committee. Martinevans123 (talk) 11:15, 29 March 2016 (UTC)

It should be "member of parliament". It is only capitalised in "MP" because that is an acronym. See The Economist style guide: "If you want to describe the office rather than the individual, use lower case: The next archbishop of Canterbury will be a woman. Use lower case, too, in references simply to the archbishop, the emir, the shah: The Duchess of Scunthorpe was in her finery, but the duke wore jeans". RGloucester — ☎ 14:36, 29 March 2016 (UTC)

I've never seen an office wearing jeans. And if "MP" is an acronym, so is WTF. I'm sure you'd agree that David Cameron is the "Member of Parliament for Whitney", but you're suggesting that use of the phrase "even though as he was not a Member of Parliament.." over there is wrong? Martinevans123 (talk) 14:43, 29 March 2016 (UTC)

"David Cameron is the Member of Parliament for Whitney", but "David Cameron is a member of parliament", and "David Cameron is a member of the House of Commons". Likewise, "Lord Williams was the Archbishop of Canterbury", but "Across history, the archbishop of Canterbury has presided over the coronations of English, and later British, monarchs". This is pretty standard. It is true that it used to be more common to capitalise more nouns than we do now, for example, "The University is..." when referring to a specific university, but that usage is no longer considered to be the standard by most style guides. Indeed, there was a time when all nouns were capitalised in English, as in German. The general trend, however, has been toward less capitalisation, and our MoS follows that trend. RGloucester — ☎ 17:03, 29 March 2016 (UTC)

Looking forward to your trendy correction. Good luck. Martinevans123 (talk) 17:10, 29 March 2016 (UTC)

Going back to what Peter coxhead said above, it's a queen Elizabeth-class aircraft carrier then? Ridiculous! Sorry for the late reply, but I've been very seriously ill for the last few days. Mjroots (talk) 15:33, 30 March 2016 (UTC)

Sorry to hear. But hope your king Charles Spaniels are well. Martinevans123 (talk) 15:42, 30 March 2016 (UTC)

They would be if I had them, but I'm ruled by a far more intelligent species. Mjroots (talk) 16:33, 30 March 2016 (UTC)

It is not "queen Elizabeth-class aircraft carrier". "Queen" in that instance is a title, and titles when attached to a specific person's name are capitalised. No one would ever write "queen Elizabeth". Did you read the link I gave you, by any chance? RGloucester — ☎ 16:48, 30 March 2016 (UTC)

I was just showing how ridiculous the statement was; and no, I didn't read the linked article. This is Wikipedia, not The Economist. Mjroots (talk) 17:32, 30 March 2016 (UTC)

Our styling in this respect is very similar to the styling of The Economist. Furthermore, said style guide demonstrates use by a reliable British source. Regardless, one cannot say that the statement was "ridiculous" if one did not understand it, which I imagine one must've done if one thought that one would ever write "queen Elizabeth-class aircraft carrier". RGloucester — ☎ 18:15, 30 March 2016 (UTC)

One might, but another one might not. Martinevans123 (talk) 18:17, 30 March 2016 (UTC)

@Mjroots and Martinevans123: noun phrases have to be parsed carefully to decide what the determiner modifies. In "a King Charles spaniel", it's "spaniel". In "a Queen Elizabeth-class aircraft carrier", it's "aircraft carrier". So these examples have nothing to say about the capitalization of "King" and "Queen".

The issue of "Justice of the Peace" being clearer than "justice of the peace" when embedded in a sentence is a different one. Capitalization and proper noun phrases are two related but separate issues. I would personally prefer to capitalize "Justice of the Peace" in the same way that I would prefer to capitalize the English names of species, like "Green Warbler". Not because they are proper noun phrases – they are not – but because it makes the specialized use of the words clear; a "Green Warbler" is then clearly different from a "green warbler". But the consensus in the English Wikipedia, at least at present, is against such capitalization, and the MOS is quite clear, both in regard to job titles and English species names. So we have to go along with it, regardless of our personal preferences. Peter coxhead (talk) 18:20, 30 March 2016 (UTC)

Thank you Peter for a very clear reply. I also would prefer to see capitalised Warblers flitting around. And I realise that my personal preference is out of line with Wikipedia consensus. I'm still rather sceptical that "every dictionary" supports this consensus. My Concise Oxford certainly does not. I'm in agreement with Ghmyrtle about what I still see is "reality". Martinevans123 (talk) 18:29, 30 March 2016 (UTC)

Re; so we have to go along with it"... Not necessarily... One of the things that makes Wikipedia a unique publication is that we don't have an editorial board who set style rules that our writers then must follow. Our writers are our editorial board. We set our own style rules... And If we don't like something that our MOS says, we can collectively change the rules by amending the MOS.

If we (collectively) agree that a title like "Justice of the Peace" should be capitalized, we can simply amend the MOS to allow it. The only question is, do we collectively agree? I do. Blueboar (talk) 19:15, 30 March 2016 (UTC)

I agree too. This should cover those positions where the holder is appointed by the Monarch or Government (and we are only talking British titles here, including those historically located in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland during such time as that entity existed). For these purposes, "British" includes the Isle of Man and Channel Islands. Thus such titles would include JP, QC/KC, AM, MP, MEP, MSP, MHK, MLA etc. Mjroots (talk) 19:29, 30 March 2016 (UTC)

I'd support all of those. Is it just my UK blinkers? Seems unlikely with RGloucester close at hand. Maybe it's very different over in the land of the district attorney. Martinevans123 (talk) 22:44, 30 March 2016 (UTC)

Strongly oppose – The present guidance is modern, clear, and more in line with the relevant style guides. If anything, British usage tends to use fewer capital letters than American usage, so I do not know what my fellow Britons are going on about with regard to "justices of the peace". Appointment by the monarch or the government has nothing to do with capitalisation on Wikipedia or anywhere else, and such an exception would be downright absurd. RGloucester — ☎ 23:01, 30 March 2016 (UTC)

You are correct that the English capitalize titles less often than Americans (who tend to over-capitalize)... Which means that we should pay more attention to exceptions to the norm... I.e. those titles that they do routinely capitalize. Our current guidance is fine when generalized (in "most" cases) but often exceptions have to be allowed when considering specific titles. Blueboar (talk) 23:17, 30 March 2016 (UTC)

Who mentioned "the English"? How dare you! As a North Briton, I find such references disgusting. Regardless, none of the mentioned posts are exceptions in standard British usage. British usage generally uses lowercase for references to common nouns, i.e. "the office" as mentioned by The Economist style guide above. "Justice of the peace" is indeed "justice of the peace", unless one writes "Justice of the Peace Stephen So&So" (even that is a bit much, and is probably a construction to be avoided). I've already given you The Economist guide's guidance above, so take a look at The Guardian's guidance. It says "jobs) all lc, eg prime minister, US secretary of state, chief rabbi, editor of the Guardian. titles) cap up titles, but not job description, eg President Barack Obama (but the US president, Barack Obama, and Obama on subsequent mention); the Duke of Westminster (the duke at second mention); Pope Francis but the pope". How about the BBC style guide? Regarding political job titles, it says "Any post mentioned without reference to the post-holder should be in lower case". Please don't invent fiction out of thin air. Our guidance is in line with modern style guides. RGloucester — ☎ 23:33, 30 March 2016 (UTC)

Are you implying that we should follow the BBC style guide in lower-casing posts mentioned without reference to the post-holder? That would appear to suggest changing article titles such as "Prime Minister of ...", "Vice President of ...", "General Secretary of ...". Or should we treat "Prime Minister of the United Kingdom" as a title (rather than a job description), even when it does not refer to a specific office-holder (as in article titles) and then follow the Guardian in capitalizing titles. The latter seems to approximate actual usage on Wikipedia with regard to articles about specific posts. --Boson (talk) 00:50, 31 March 2016 (UTC)

I support the present guidance. Generally, I'm more attached to The Economist style guide than any of the other ones. As I explained above, full titles of that sort are capitalised. The Guardian concurs with The Economist in this regard. The BBC is slightly more radical in this regard, and I doubt that anyone here would support "Prime minister of the United Kingdom", thought I might support it. That's not what we're here for, however. My point was to demonstrate that British usage is trending toward fewer capitals, rather than more, and that none of the relevant guides would style "justice of the peace" as "Justice of the Peace". RGloucester — ☎ 01:14, 31 March 2016 (UTC)

So could you tell us which you think are "the relevant guides? You're ruling out BBC usage because "it's not what we're here for"? Thanks. Martinevans123 (talk) 07:25, 31 March 2016 (UTC)

@Martinevans123: haggling over particular style guides isn't useful; like it or not, RGloucester is correct in saying that British usage is trending toward fewer capitals. (Here's another example of the fact that proper noun phrases and conventionally capitalized phrases are not the same. Consider the sentence "This is explained on Page 11." By any test, "Page 11" is here a proper noun phrase – semantically it refers to one specific entity, one specific page; grammatically it cannot be proceeded by a determiner. So I was taught to capitalize and taught my students the same. Now it's distinctly old-fashioned, and almost all modern style guides advise against it, as does our MOS.) Peter coxhead (talk) 08:20, 31 March 2016 (UTC)

I guess we have to give your comments more weight here, as you were once in an educational role that involved you teaching students? I trust all your students are happy in their modern uncapitalised world. We can look forward to them editing Wikipedia, no doubt. It's discouraging to see you say "almost all modern style guides" but for me to be told "I'm haggling." RGloucester has mentioned The Economist and The Guardian - I imagine there are also relevant US ones. If we are to have consensus on a MoS ruling for this point, I think editors will want to know what it's based on. I'm not sure I'd be convinced by any more counter-examples - even if they're on page Three. Martinevans123 (talk) 09:15, 31 March 2016 (UTC)

Wow, you still have Page-3 Girls? We lost ours not long after the Tele bought the Mirror. Pelagic (talk) 13:09, 31 March 2016 (UTC)

Sorry, was just getting nostalgic for the joys of younger ladies. Martinevans123 (talk) 13:28, 31 March 2016 (UTC)

If you search for "capitalization job titles" you'll find plenty of US examples, including the Chicago Manual of Style, which use the same rules as are set out in the MOS. Peter coxhead (talk) 13:54, 31 March 2016 (UTC)

Looking at the Project Page here, we have one external link to "Chicago Style Q&A on caps". Should the predominance of this style guide be explained somehow in the text? Or, if it's not predominant, should links to the other style guides, on which capitalization MoS has been based, be explained and linked also? Thanks. Martinevans123 (talk) 14:08, 31 March 2016 (UTC)

Somewhere in the archives of the MOS and its subpages (currently 181 archives for the main MOS alone!) you'll find discussions on whether the MOS should be sourced; they've always resulted in the answer "no". Don't shoot the messenger! Peter coxhead (talk) 14:56, 31 March 2016 (UTC)

Just questions, not guns. A link to just the latest one would suffice, I'm sure. Thanks. Martinevans123 (talk) 15:07, 31 March 2016 (UTC)

I'm not sure that the current guidance does a good job of explaining the difference between, say, "justice of the peace", "Prime Minister of the United Kingdom", and "President of the Senate" (as in "The President of the Senate is a title often given to the presiding officer of a senate, and is the speaker of other assemblies."). So I would be in favour of improving the wording.

As a general rule I am not in favour of using journalists' style guides as a basis for Wikipedia (though The Economist Style Guide is far better than The Times equivalent) so I would prefer to base Wikipedia style on New Hart's Rules (2005) and/or CMS.

'The Times Style and Usage Guide says

"the general rule is that for the most senior high-profile jobs we should cap at first mention, and thereafter l/c. Thus most church titles, senior civil servants, diplomatic and political leaders, civic leaders, Editor (of well-known leading publications), Director-General (of the BBC, CBI, etc.), Vice-Chancellor and academic titles Chief Constable and police ranks, military titles, President of a small number of high-profile national institutions (e.g. President of the Law Society, the TUC etc.), all take the cap at first mention and then – usually – l/c thereafter. Exceptions where the cap is retained are Prime Minister, President (of a state), Archbishop and Bishop. [Lowercase for company chairmen etc.] A certain amount of discretion is needed in this difficult area. "

New Hart's Rules states

"Words for titles and ranks are generally lower case unless they are used before a name, as a name, or in forms of address ..."

Exceptions to this rule are some unique compound titles that have no non-specific meaning, which in many styles are capitalized in all contexts.

Examples are:

Advocate General

Attorney General

...

Chief Justice

...

Regardless of their syntactic roles, references to specific holders of a rank or title are often capitalized.:

a letter from the Prime Minister

..."

It goes on to indicate some problems of this approach.

--Boson (talk) 17:27, 31 March 2016 (UTC)

I find The Times guide too journalistic and arbitrary for our use. Hart's is a similarly vague. Chicago is pretty good. It says:

"Civil, military, religious, and professional titles are capitalized when they immediately precede a personal name and are thus used as part of the name (typically replacing the title holder’s first name). In formal prose and other generic text (as opposed to promotional or ceremonial contexts or a heading), titles are normally lowercased when following a name or used in place of a name".

It gives the following examples:

President Lincoln; the president
General Bradley; the general
Cardinal Newman; the cardinal
Governors Quinn and Paterson; the governors

This is more or less in line with The Guardian and The Economist. RGloucester — ☎ 18:05, 31 March 2016 (UTC)

@RGloucester: Re MP: Like I said above, it would be "member of Parliament", for the same reason that the Economist gives "archbishop of Canterbury" and not "archbishop of canterbury". "Parliament" (with no "the") is a capitalised proper name, though we can talk about "the UK parliament". The Economist appears to concur here, given the style they use when they talk about MPs elsewhere in their guide: [3] Members of Parliament are MPs: of the Scottish Parliament, MSPs; and of the European Parliament, MEPs (not Euro-MPs). Except in the Britain section, use MP only after first spelling out member of Parliament in full, though their actual usage is inconsistent, judging from a Google search of their website. I don't object to either "Member of Parliament" or "member of Parliament", but I would object to "member of parliament" for this reason. —Nizolan ^(talk) 09:37, 1 April 2016 (UTC)

It would not be "member of Parliament". Some style guides do capitalise "Parliament" when referring to a specific parliament, as does The Economist, but the MoS does not allow for it (MOS:INSTITUTIONS). It is very rare for us on Wikipedia to write in a way that would use a capitalised "Parliament" without a descriptor, as context is not clear on Wikipedia, and because we write for a global audience. In other words, one must write "A member of the French parliament" (description, instead of a formal name), as opposed to a "member of Parliament", rendering this irrelevant. That's where the encyclopaedic and journalistic registers differ. RGloucester — ☎ 15:31, 1 April 2016 (UTC)

"Parliament" doesn't fall under MOS:INSTITUTIONS, though, because it's a proper term and not a generic descriptor like "the university" in the MOS example. Hence my example of "the UK parliament" above: "the parliament" is lower-case, but "Parliament" is not. Similarly, "member of the French parliament" is correct, as you suggest, but "member of parliament" is not. The same reasoning applies to other terms like "Crown-in-Parliament" (not crown-in-parliament) and so on. Context doesn't come into it, I think, since it won't be rendered any less ambiguous by being written with a lower-case letter. —Nizolan ^(talk) 15:44, 1 April 2016 (UTC)

Also, as an addendum here, N.B. that I'm only talking about the term when used in reference to a specific institution so titled—"member of parliament" would indeed be lower-case in a generic context, I imagine, for example when describing the general concept of a member of parliament. —Nizolan ^(talk) 15:55, 1 April 2016 (UTC)

"Parliament" is not a proper name, just a generic term for a legislature. Using it in the way you describe is a vestige of the old English usage that capitalised generic nouns when referring to specific institutions in abbreviate form, e.g. "University of Somewhere is a university in Somewhere. Students at the University are known for their studiousness". I.e. shortened forms retained the capitalisation found in the full form. That usage is not common in style guides today, and is proscribed by the MoS in the institutions section. "Crown-in-Parliament" is a totally separate matter, being a legal term. RGloucester — ☎ 16:40, 1 April 2016 (UTC)

There's confusion about "Parliament" vs. "parliament" because when a British newspaper uses it, they are using it, when capitalized, as a short form of Parliament of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. It is understood that they can only mean that particular parliament, for the same reason you know when I say to you, "damn, the cat just puked on the floor", I mean my cat here right now not some cat in Botswana. Here is where style guides fork sharply. Some insist on capitalizing such shortenings (i.e., if you are on the University of Fooville Board of Directors, you are on the Board of the University), and this is the older, traditional, "snooty" style, largely eschewed in modern publications as an unseemly level of aggrandizement. I went to a committee meeting, not a Committee meeting, though in longer form I went to the Region 7 Budgetary and Finance Committee meeting). Most city newspapers also do this with things like "the Council" meaning "the City Council of [City Name Here]". WP generally doesn't have that understood context. An argument can be made that it does sometimes, e.g. inside an article on an entirely British topic. Buy why bother captitalising it? It is certainly not wrong that a particular MP is a member of parliament, in a particular country, and it's only correct in a dwindling number of style guides to say they are a member of Parliament much less (unless used as a title before their name) a Member of Parliament. So we really have no reason to use that style. Regardless of this losing fight to keep capitalizing proper names when shortened down to their common name form, if and only if they clearly and solely refer to a specific entity, there is no question at all that the words are lowercased in a construction like "the regulatory conference drew members of parliament, city councilors, government department and ministry heads, and other lawmakers from over 50 countries". — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼ 05:44, 2 April 2016 (UTC)

Ah, ~~Standen~~Stanton. What kept you? Thanks for that. Could you offer your views on Justice of the Peace, as part of this "losing fight", which is where the thread started? Or was it just neatly swept up by your Specialized-style fallacy? Thanks. Martinevans123 (talk) 08:45, 2 April 2016 (UTC)

My name's not spelled that way (it's Stanton). Anyway, I already did address that. "Justice of the Peace Chris Connelly" would be capitalized like that, when used integrally with the person's name. "Chris Connelly, while working as a justice of the peace, was abducted and held for ransom" = no caps on the title. Coming back to this thread a month later, I see that RGloucester covered every point I would have. — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼ 21:05, 3 May 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for clarifying that. Apologies about the mis-spelling of your name, which I have now corrected. I'm afraid that to me "a justice of the peace" still looks as wrong as "a member of parliament". Perhaps this is because I'm so used to reading them both capitalised in the British press, where the context is always the UK, and where they thus act as titles. Martinevans123 (talk) 21:09, 3 May 2016 (UTC) p.s. RGloucester didn't explain to me why why just have one link, on the Project page here, in External links, to the Chicago Style Guide. I'm sorry if you feel you would not want to cover this point, even after a month. Martinevans123 (talk) 21:41, 3 May 2016 (UTC)

MoS itself does not defer to one particular publisher's external style guide. I don't know why someone linked to some blog page by the publisher of one of them (it's not even part of the guide they publish, but part of a "come ask us, we're the experts" promotional interactive site they use to sell paid subscriptions). It's inappropriate per WP:SOAPBOX and WP:SPAM, so I deleted it. The only time MoS pages should be citing something external is when we're quoting from something (e.g. a technical specification we assert says something very particular, such as the IEEE and WGAC specs cited by MOS:NUM and MOS:ACCESS). — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼ 05:28, 5 May 2016 (UTC)

Digression into MoS's history and nature

So there was "a putsch" to "try to force citations into MoS", was there? I must have missed that. I still think it would be instructive for any reader to see those sources on which the Wikipedia Style Guide is based. What's the argument for not showing those again? Martinevans123 (talk) 07:54, 5 May 2016 (UTC)

Talk page archives exist for a reason, but I guess I can summarize this easily enough.

The précis version of several years of this stuff:

Guidelines aren't articles.
All it did was generate about seven years of increasing strife and tendentious battlegrounding, mired in PoV-pushing based on idiosyncratic and extremely selective interpretation of other style guides and their relative merits.
No two style guides agree on every point.
No style point has agreement in every style guide.
That is, for every style point there is disagreement in reliable sources, and no universally correct answer.
Nevertheless, publishers have a house style, and it's especially important for a publisher with a lot of writers to have one, to prevent stylistic chaos and more energy being spent arguing over style than actually writing content.
Written style varies sharply by register, genre, and intended audience/purpose (more so than it does by region).
Style, when not an arbitrary choice between equal options, is a matter of consensus on practicalities and expectations (see previous points).
The sourcing work we do on language questions should be for mainspace articles. Most of ours on English usage are terrible, because people have wasted enormous amounts of time trying to "source the MoS", a quixotic exercise, instead of working on the relevant encyclopedic material. It's so much easier to beat a battle-drum over a preference and conviction backed by cherry-picked pseudo-sourcing than to prove one's point in the mainspace venue, where POV, OR, RS/V, and other noticeboards can enforce content standards.

I think that covers the gist of the debate. There were never more than a handful of people trying push for MoS line-items to be externally sourced, and after one of them got topic-banned and later indefinitely blocked, and the two pages devoted to the "source the MoS" campaigning were WP:MFDed, these WP:NOT#ADVOCACY antics have almost completely stopped, except with regard to the recent going-nowhere battle to overcapitalize song titles. That, too, has just about been put to rest at this point.

If my work in this part of the project leaves any legacy, hopefully it will be the lasting consensus that circle-jerky documentation of documentation of documentation over MoS style trivia and other matters of internal, non-reader-facing matters is a WP:NOTHERE drain on the project's editorial productivity.

There are no external sources for internal consensus. Imagine someone suggesting that WP:CIVIL or WP:VANDAL or WP:RS had to have external citations for everything in it. No one not of WP can tell WP how to address collegiality, what inappropriate editing is, or how we decide source reliability. No one not of WP can tell WP how it has to style what it publishes.

MoS consensus is informed in part by what some external style guides say, but often instead by observation of what other, modern reference works are actually doing (e.g., our disambiguation styles were largely borrowed from Britannica, and I'm not aware of any paper style guide anywhere that addresses the question at all). For more general matters, more general published-source observation plays a larger part (thus, e.g., WP:COMMONNAME, and the recent RfC that changed MOS:JR to match the post-1980s majority English usage across all dialects). But all of that research and observation is, per WP:NOT#PAPER, etc., quite sharply moderated by unique Wikipedian evaluation of what WP needs for its own goals, functionality, and audience. This is, in its very essence, original research, and there's a very good reason that the core content policies do not apply to WP:POLICY pages themselves. Policies and guidelines are internal procedural documentation, not part of the readers' encyclopedia content.

People who cannot understand or will not acknowledge this are making the basic general semantics error of mistaking the recipe for the cake, the driver for the car. Trying to treat the MoS or any other guideline or policy as if it were the end-product encyclopedia content these internal best-practices documents help shape is not appreciably different from insisting that the user manual for the C++ programming language must itself be written in C++ instead of English as if it were intended for the same machine audience as C++ programs.

— SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼ 04:50, 9 May 2016 (UTC)

I think any readers would find links to the sources very useful. So people have made a lovely cake. I don't see that's a good reason to keep the recipe a secret. I think your C++ analogy is misguided. I don't think I'm making a general semantics error. So sorry to even mention "this stuff". Martinevans123 (talk) 09:52, 14 May 2016 (UTC)

The word "as"

Latest comment: 8 years ago11 comments2 people in discussion

After Talk:As Long as You Love Me and Talk:It's the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine), I wonder how the word "as" should be treated. Shall it be the same as other lowercased short prepositions or different from them or case-by-case or what? Also, the passage says to uppercase "[w]ords that have the same form as prepositions, but are not being used specifically as prepositions." However, it exemplifies them with phrasal verbs and first words of compound prepositions. --George Ho (talk) 19:19, 25 April 2016 (UTC)

Re: "Shall it be the same as other lowercased short prepositions...?" Well, yes, of course. The wording there probably needs clarification. It is not actually the case that every conceivable use of short words that are usually prepositions should be capitalized when they're not being used as prepositions. The two actual exceptions are when used as coordinating conjunctions, and used as necessary parts of compound verbs and verbal nouns (like the "up" in "to look up something in the dictionary" or in "an unusually slow database look-up"). There are other conjunctive uses and so forth that are also lower case. I have to observe that some style guides, including NYT I think, though I'd have to look it up again), just lowercase the word "as" always, no matter what, to avoid grammatical hair-splitting debates about such matters. Whether particular uses of as (and like) are actually conjunctive or prepositional or not has been fiercely debated for over 200 years, according to the etymological information provided by Oxford, so that matter is never going to be settled by a few arguments on WP talk pages, and trying to settle it here is original research we should steer well clear of (or, of which we should steer well clear, if you're a fan of the Victorian proscription of ending a sentence with a proposition). — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼ 06:36, 2 May 2016 (UTC)

Stanton, no evidence proves "as" as a coordinate conjunction but a subordinate or correlative conjunction. Unfortunately, Chicago Style instructs a reader not to capitalize "as" (per 22.3.1.1 from A Manual for Writers of Research Papers, Theses, and Dissertations). What do other manuals from WP:NCCAPS say? George Ho (talk) 21:56, 8 May 2016 (UTC)

Found descriptions about "as" from Fowler's Dictionary. George Ho (talk) 01:02, 9 May 2016 (UTC)

There's nothing "unfortunate" about Chicago saying something, it's simply a fact. If you're approaching WP from the perspective of "unfortunately, the sources say X when I want to write Y", you might want a different hobby. No joke.

The "no evidence" you've looked at doesn't mean no evidence exists. See any reasonable grammar and usage guide. You can even find all this in seconds via Google, Yandex, whatever.

Quick summary of the word as used four ways:

As as a preposition: "My cats do not succeed as hunters very often."
As as a coordinating conjunction: "I prefer cats, as they are less obsequious than dogs." For, because, and since can also be used in this construction and are also coordinating conjunctions in that role.
As as a correlative conjunction: "My Bengal cat is not as fierce as the miniature leopard she looks like." (These work in pairs, though the words do not, of course, have to be the same word, as in "neither ... nor", or "both ... and", or "not only ... but also". Even the "as ... as" pair can be replaced with "so ... as" (try it in my Bengal cat sentence), though that is an increasingly archaic construction.
As as a subordinating conjunction: "My Manx cat hops as a rabbit does." The bare use of as in this sense is also moving toward obsolescence, and most subordinating uses of as are used directly with a "helper" word, as in "as in", "as if", and "as though".

Some stock constructions that originated as correlative and are still usually classified as such, including "as long as", "as much as", and "as soon as", are treated as subordinating conjunctions by a few sources, which view each such construction as a three-word but unitary form operating as if a single, subordinating word. As I said earlier, linguists and proto-linguists have been arguing about how to classify particular uses of as and like for centuries, and even Oxford and Cambridge today still contradict each other on the fine points. In short, there is doubt, and when there is doubt there is inconsistent treatment. When in doubt, or when faced with inconsistent treatment, both MoS and the preponderance of print style guides recommend down-casing, and this downcasing is reflected in publications of a similar character to Wikipedia, e.g. reference works and academic books, as opposed to MTV blurbs, amateur blog posts, and ivory-tower specialist journals.

I already did the source research you (George Ho) want, against my better judgment, a few months ago (on this same talk page), but for the word "like" instead of "as". That was a more complex case because of the "four-letter rule" favored by a lot of journalism publishers. There is no "two-letter" rule used by anyone, so there is no actual issue to resolve with as. I and seemingly the rest of the WP editorial community are content with the MOS:CAPS advice of not capitalizing unless a strong majority of reliable sources capitalize. The word as is generally not capitalized except when it is a subordinating conjunction. The fact that some entertainment marketing and journalism overcapitalizes in titles has no implications for MoS or WP whatsoever. It's mimicry of Capitalization For Emphasis In Album, Movie, And TV Advertising, about which see the very first section of MOS:CAPS after its lead, and see also MOS:TM.

If you want "as"-specific research, you're welcome to do it. Invest in some style manuals yourself. :-) Given the amount of work I've put into doing style-guide and other source reviews for MoS questions, being met in turn by irrational campaigns of denialism and tendentiousness by people who are certain in their hearts that the way they poorly remember learning to write in seventh grade, 20-odd years ago in Yeehaw, Nebraska, or Wotguv, Devonshire, is the only correct way to write so everyone else can go jump off a cliff, I am not all motivated to do this homework for you. EEng summarized the "like"-related research and all the I-refuse-to-believe venting that ensued about it, as "another colossal fucking waste of time" [4]. I tend to agree, and decline to duplicate it for trivia like whether to capitalize "as" in some song title (we already know the answer is "don't, unless it's unequivocally subordinating").
PS: The Turabian Manual for Writers of Research Papers you mention is a tertiary source, just rehash of The Chicago Manual of Style for undergraduates, with some summaries of APA, AMA, etc., citation styles tacked on. We already know they both favor "down style". The Butterfield edition of Fowler's is no help on this question; for as, it mostly addressed use of the word with other words ("as if", etc.), an does not address its use in titles of compositions, while for capitalization, it defers explicitly to the current edition of New Hart's Rules. NHR (§8.2.3) is generally noncommittal on the matter, leaving it up to editorial judgement, but leaning toward the Chicago view that nouns, verbs and other "important" words should be capitalized and less important words not. One of the failings of the last two editions of Hart's is forgetting its role as a style guide and lapsing into pure linguistic description that various styles exist, without any discussion of which registers to which they belong. This, however, can be gleaned from the source review I previously did for like: When virtually all journalism guides are in the "four-letter" camp, academic journal guides in the "sentence case" camp, and mainstream/general guides in the "five-letter rule" camp, the patterns are very clear.
— SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼ 02:42, 9 May 2016 (UTC)

Looks like I must by default follow what Chicago says about "as" because the current revision of MOS:CT seems unclear on the "as" situation. In other words, if I follow the Chicago as discussed below, then I must avoid case-by-case method and make more central discussions if this discussion fails. George Ho (talk) 06:32, 9 May 2016 (UTC)

Digression on Hart's, Chicago, and MoS's raison d'etre

I noticed your review at Amazon, Stanton, about Hart's Rule, 2nd ed. If you have a problem with Hart's Rule, shall we propose a replacement, like MLA or APA or which else? Otherwise, maybe follow what any manual says? --George Ho (talk) 03:54, 9 May 2016 (UTC)

I'm not sure what you mean by "propose a replacement"; NHR, or Chicago, or any other style guide, have no kind of official position at Wikipedia. They're each just one among a large number of subjective style guides we can compare. The problems with the MLA, APA, AMA, etc., guides are that they're not comprehensive, being primarily about citation formatting rather than general writing; they're jealously guarded fiefdoms of one-organization idiosyncrasies; they're highly field-specific and conflict with each other on a large number of things; and, with the sole exception of the tiny MHRA, they're all distinctively and unabashedly American. They're mainly useful in the aggregate – do they all unanimously agree on something?

Some background on Hart's, etc.

The original Hart's Rules was a highly influential one in the 20th to early 21st century (it was last published as such in 1989, and an expanded version, The Oxford Guide to Style, came out in 2002, reprinted in 2003 as part of Oxford Style Manual; a copy of either of the latter is very valuable, content-wise, because they pre-date the NHR editors' unwise changes in focus and approach, so sweeping that the books are difficult to directly compare in many aspects). The New Hart's editions (along with their corresponding – and also heavily altered – so-called Fowler's volumes, with very little of H. W. Fowler's advice remaining) rarely appear to be cited by anyone for anything, and they're new enough to not have had much impact across the publishing world yet even if they'd been better received; the current edition of Chicago Manual of Style dates to 2010, and publishers are still catching up to it, as well.

All that said, NHR is more up-to-date on many usage matters than the old HR, and it does not lapse into advice-free, indiscriminate descriptivism on everything, just in a few key places (probably under pressure from British/Commonwealth news and entertainment publishers, given the exact failure points in NHR). By their nature as comparatively but not excessively academic in register, and general rather than field-specific (much less trade-association-specific) guides for non-fiction publishing, WP has depended more on Chicago and Hart's/Oxford than most others (for overall writing matters; for scientific style issues, the go-to default has mostly been CSE's Scientific Style and Format). But that's incidental, really, and no one should be fetishizing Chicago or any other single style guide. Chicago has flagrant errors in it, for one thing; I don't mean just issues of questionable interpretation and shameless American jingoism, but directly provable mistakes – some of them particularly inexplicable given that CSE, from the same publisher, gets those points correct, so one hand clearly doesn't know what the other is doing, a problem also apparent at Oxford between NHR and Fowler's, the new edition of which I've also reviewed critically at Amazon.

I'm also not sure what you mean by "follow what any manual says", unless you mean some kind of Jedi hand-wave like "WP should have no house style at all, because any imaginable style, no matter how unencyclopedic, must be permissible if it can be found in any off-WP style guide ever published by anyone, anywhere." WP already had that discussion a decade and a half ago when it decided to have its own house style manual like other publishers do. "Follow what any manual says" is functionally indistinguishable from "do whatever random thing comes into your head as long as you didn't personally invent it yourself out of nowhere or at least don't think anyone will challenge you as having done so." (And people try that; I seem to recall someone recently being topic-banned from changing comma placement because they insist on abusing commas in ways that can't be found in any style guides that post-date the 1920s). A key, above-policies core principle (at WP:5P) is that any crappy material inserted by one editor will be "mercilessly" improved by others. Because humans are more organized, standardizing, formalizing, and future-considering than less sentient animals, a consequence of this is that best practices emerge from this kind of process automatically, naturally, and rapidly. These are codified here (just as they are in other contexts, like laws and employee manuals) as guidelines and policies (and key essays); this is why policypages exist – WP:POLICY (the policy about policy) explains this clearly. — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼ 06:05, 9 May 2016 (UTC)

My apologies if I confuse you. I assume you know I was discussing what WP:NCCAPS recommends when in doubt; I guess not. According to you, if Chicago is out as erroneous, and Hart's is out as problematic and inconsistent, we would be left with Elements and Fowler's. You said you reviewed Fowler's, but I don't see your review on the newest, fourth edition. Also, what's your take on Elements? As for follow any manual, well... you had problems with Chicago and Hart's. Even so, I don't want to ignore these manuals ever. However, if any of those manuals recommended by NCCAPS are unreliable, you should propose that they not be used or recommended. Otherwise, I should follow them. George Ho (talk) 06:26, 9 May 2016 (UTC)

Pointer to title-capitalization summary

For anyone struggling with the general notion of title capitalization, this short article by Mignon "Grammar Girl" Fogarty summarizes the gist [5] (and I don't often recommend her stuff, but she's just summarizing here, not doing her own analysis and recommendation): There are multiple styles, and publishers just have to pick one. Not long after it started, WP picked the one that is the most used in the publishing of academic and reference books like encyclopedias (the "five-letter rule"), versus any of the extreme styles used in journalism ("four-letter rule", or the pseudo-rule to Capitalize Everything Like Mad Because It Looks K001), or scientific journals (sentence case, and actually some news publishers also use it, just to "be different"). WP uses sentence case for our own article titles and headings for some particular reasons we need not get into here in detail (short version: for search-related technical reasons, and to not confuse readers about what is and is not a proper name, plus some others). If WP were to change at all in its treatment of titles of externally published works, it would probably be to uniformly sentence-case the lot of them, for consistency and to just get people to STFU about it. I think that is the least desirable outcome to you, George Ho, and many other editors. The likelihood of this outcome is a good reason to stop campaigning for change on this trivial short-word capitalization stuff. — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼ 02:42, 9 May 2016 (UTC)

Over-capitalization of events, movements, etc.

Latest comment: 7 years ago26 comments9 people in discussion

Historians like to capitalize things like Montgomery Bus Boycott, Chicago Open Housing Movement, Selma Voting Rights Movement, and such. The first of these was dealt with (fixed to lowercase per MOS:CAPS and WP:NCCAPS) in an RM recently, but the other two are redirects, not article titles, so are not subject to that process. Yet Randy Kryn argues they should be treated in RMs, as or "acceptable alternate titles", e.g. at these reverts: [6], [7]. And this discussion: User talk:Randy Kryn#What's with the caps?. I can understand why he want to bring the issue to the article talk pages, to get some boost from editors in his topic area via WP:SSF, but isn't this really a better issue for central guidance? I'm looking for a good alternative to a one-on-one edit war or a gang-up. I don't think we need yet another RFC on whether MOS:CAPS is a consensus guideline (it is) or whether this social history area should go their specialist way. Any good ideas? Dicklyon (talk) 15:55, 30 April 2016 (UTC)

We deal with this a lot in our various crime related articles (especially "X massacre" vs "X Massacre")... And the answer is: it depends... Is the phrase used by historians purely descriptive in nature, or has it morphed into a proper names for the event? Purely descriptive titles should be in lowercase, proper names should be uppercase. It is not always easy to tell... You have to look at a lot of sources to determine the pattern. Blueboar (talk) 16:25, 30 April 2016 (UTC)

I showed Randy the basis in sources in the talk page discussion that I linked. Dicklyon (talk) 16:30, 30 April 2016 (UTC)

Also you can see lots of alternative names in books, e.g. Selma voting right march, Selma voting rights demonstration, Selma voting rights campaign. Not much evidence of anything being accepted as a proper name there, as opposed to Chicago Freedom Movement which is widely used as a proper name. Dicklyon (talk) 16:34, 30 April 2016 (UTC)

Again Randy asserts without evidence that "Chicago Open Housing Movement" is a proper name that should be capped, and makes it so. Seems like a bad anti-MOS idea to me. Of course, he is emboldened by getting away with caps for Civil Rights Movement a while back; that seems like a styling error, too, per wikipedia's style of caps; more. Dicklyon (talk) 19:53, 30 April 2016 (UTC)

I was already addressing this at Talk:Chicago Freedom Movement, but if discussion is centralizing here I'll just copy-paste what I said there: 'This rampant overcapitalization needs to stop. Randy Kryn, you can't cite your own off-site article, per WP:COI, as the "evidence" that "open housing movement" is a proper name and must be capitalized. As we see in the post immediately above this [i.e. the post [8] at that page], people involved in this field overcapitalize quite excessively, even things like "the Chicago Real Estate Industry", which is akin to writing "the Bus Driver Occupation" or "the Hobby of Playing Video Games All Night". It's the specialized-style fallacy, the belief that anything significant to students, aficionados, or specialists of something is Magically Imbued with Special Status and deserves capitalized letters all over the place just because It's So Very Damned Important. English just does not work that way.' — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼ 06:29, 2 May 2016 (UTC)

There is no centralized discussion, it's the same people talking to each other (if I perceived Wikipedia from the editors who post about things like commas and which case a title should be, I'd think it consisted of about half a dozen people, with a few more passing by from time to time). OK, to address the issues. Possibly Chicago Open Housing Movement is generally inaccurate - I'm honestly surprised that more sources don't use it. It's a name, capitalized, that I've heard and known for decades. As for other CRM names, the Montgomery Bus Boycott has certainly become a proper name. This long-term event "kicked off" the physical movement, and brought many of the major participants into prominence, including. King, Ralph Abernathy, Rosa Parks, Fred Gray, Coretta Scott King, and E.D. Nixon. As time goes by it seems more obvious that the MBBoycott has been and is being used as a proper name. There are a few of these CRM events which should be capitalized, and Montgomery Bus Boycott is one of those. That event wasn't "magically imbued with special status" among only historians, but within the national memory of the U.S. Randy Kryn 11:04, 2 May 2016 (UTC)

It is a centralized discussion, since this thread covers "events, movements, etc.", and the one at the other page is about one specific example. "Centralized" doesn't mean "attracting entirely different people". Please see some linguistics and philosophy sources on how proper nouns and proper names work. The fact that you've encountered a label multiple times doesn't make it a proper name. Pretty much every workday someone I work with refers to the third floor, second floor, etc., of the building we work in. This doesn't make them the Third Floor, etc. The fact that some people I work with like to actually capitalize that way in memos, because they, too, do no understand capitalization in English doesn't mean that the workings of capitalization in English have suddenly changed, it just means they didn't pay attention in English class, and like other specialists when communicating to specialists about their mutual specialization, they like to capitalize things in that shared special context to Make Them Seem Really Super-Duper Special. — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ Special:Contributions/SMcCandlish¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼ 21:14, 3 May 2016 (UTC)

So you think that me wanting to keep the page about the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott capitalized is because I want the Montgomery Bus Boycott to "Seem Really Super-Duper Special"? There are no words for such ignorance. Randy Kryn 21:22, 3 May 2016 (UTC)

There are words. And they often start with small letters. Martinevans123 (talk) 21:34, 3 May 2016 (UTC)

(edit conflict) Randy, I make no assumptions about your personal motivations. You do, however, need to look up the word ignorance. It doesn't mean what you seem to think it means judging from how you've attempted to use it here. Did you have anything substantive to say? I've laid out a multi-pronged case for why this sort of thing should not be capitalized, and you've done nothing to refute a single word of it, so I'll just rest my case and move on. — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼ 05:18, 5 May 2016 (UTC)

How on earth did you manage to get an edit conflict here? Martinevans123 (talk) 09:27, 5 May 2016 (UTC)

Didn't finish posting comment after I wrote it, and you posted a reply to Randy before I bothered saving what I'd written around 21:20, 3 May. — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼ 03:45, 9 May 2016 (UTC)

You waited 32 hours before trying to save? Martinevans123 (talk) 10:08, 14 May 2016 (UTC)

SMcCandlish, ignorance means "1.The condition of being uninformed or uneducated. Lack of knowledge or information.", so I got it right. What you alluded to in the context of this discussion is that things like the Montgomery Bus Boycott being capitalized is "to Make Them Seem Really Super-Duper Special". Hence, ignorance. The Montgomery Bus Boycott is and remains "super duper special", and I will not waste space again starting to explain why. Please read up on it, because if you are of a mind or live in an uneducated portion of the universe where that event is not already "super duper special", you may need "some book learnin'". Randy Kryn 9:54, 5 May 2016 (UTC)

I think the point is that the "Really Super-Duper Special" status, or other prominence, of these events is not contingent on their descriptions being capitalized in wikipedia. Dicklyon (talk) 01:22, 9 May 2016 (UTC)

Or in general. Specialized works have a tendency (especially when poorly edited) to capitalize things that are of top significance within the context upon which they focus, that are not more important than other major events in other contexts, when taking a broader view, and which are not conventionally capitalized outside specialist publications in their special context. The pro-caps position really just seems to boil down to an assumption along the lines: "Something is wrong with you because you don't share my exact priorities, which must be expressed the typographic way I desire, no matter what WP's and mainstream publishers' norms." This is very irksome to me on this particular issue, since I come from a multi-cultural family, I worked for a decade+ as a professional civil liberties activist, and I have no lack of awareness of any kind about the significance of these events within modern American culture. But I'm also an anthropologist and linguist by training.

It simply does not matter how important a particular event was within a particular societal milieu; if the rest of the world doesn't treat an appellation of that event as a capitalized proper name then it objectively is not one for encyclopedic purposes (see also MOS:ISMCAPS in particular – every single kind of thing there is routinely capitalized in sources that specialize in the topic in question, but not in more general-audience works). And that's aside from the faults of the idea of treating the phrase "Montgomery bus boycott" as a proper name under the philosophy rather than linguistics definition of "proper name"; it's not a name, it's a description. (And not all proper names from the philosophy perspective are capitalized, anyway).

People can argue until 2116 to capitalize every protest, march, and sit-in in every civil rights movement in history, and it won't make any difference; either the current, reliable, and topically independent sources capitalize them consistently, or they don't. If they don't, WP doesn't either. Otherwise, virtually everything on WP would be capitalized, because specialist works on almost every topic can be found that Capitalize For Emphasis Everything They Find Contextually Weighty. It's a terrible style, and we can't have it here, or WP's primary article content will All Be Written like a Headline, Sentence After Sentence, as first one group of specialists capitalize everything important to them, then another, then another. See also the bird species vernacular name capitalization RfC, and many more before and after it. The entire editorial community has been over this "let specialists in every topic capitalize anything they want to" idea many times, and the answer is always the same: "No thank you." — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼ 03:45, 9 May 2016 (UTC)

So, long story short (because you're long-winded), if any reliable sources use lowercase, then we can dismiss any that use capitals as being too involved with the subject or trying to make it seem special? What utter tripe. Completely prejudicial, ignorant and self-aggrandizing nonsense. Yes, let us just ignore the best possible sources just because the people writing and publishing them have a strong interest in the material, you know, the whole reason they studied it in the first place. Seems like you fail to assume good faith on the part of the source authors and publishers. I honestly think your position is backwards. We should pay more attention to those who know the subject best, and not make assumptions that we know more than they do. oknazevad (talk) 13:02, 14 May 2016 (UTC)

The key here is to determine whether the title is a description of the event or a proper name for the event. If the later, then we should capitalize. In determining this, we look not just at one or two sources... but at "the sources" in aggregate. Do a significant majority of sources present it as a name (capitalized) or a description? Yes, we should give more weight to high end sources... but that does not mean we ignore the low end sources completely. They all get tossed into the mix. And if there are significantly more low end sources, that volume can out-weigh the high end sources. The goal is to use whatever form will be the most recognizable and natural form - to use the capitalization that our readers will expect to see. Blueboar (talk) 13:51, 14 May 2016 (UTC)

Unfortunately, it isn't quite so simple, as a number of previous discussions have shown. Capitalization practices vary significantly among English-speaking countries and among publications in those countries. So what is the most recognizable and natural form to some readers won't be to others. Internal consistency is very important in the English Wikipedia, so that readers can get used to the "house style". Peter coxhead (talk) 14:16, 14 May 2016 (UTC)

That "house style" says to use common sense and make exceptions. This is really a debate between those who favor the principal of Recognizability and those who favor the principal of Consistency. When it comes to names, I almost always favor Recognizability over Consistency. Blueboar (talk) 17:46, 14 May 2016 (UTC)

@Blueboar: can you give examples of where capitalizing according to the current MoS (which is the topic of this thread) causes problems with recognizability? Is "Montgomery bus boycott" less recognizable than "Montgomery Bus Boycott"? Although off-Wikipedia I capitalize more, I'm not convinced that it has much impact, if any, on recognizability, except in particular cases where the MoS correctly allows it ("iPad", etc.). Peter coxhead (talk) 18:56, 14 May 2016 (UTC)

Given the sheer number of sources that capitalize it ... I would have to say, yes... The capitalized version is more recognizable (and natural) than the non capitalized version. It is also more Natural. The capitalized version what the majority of our readers would expect, and they would be surprised to not see it capitalized. I think Recognizability and Naturalness outweigh any need for Consistency. Blueboar (talk) 22:39, 14 May 2016 (UTC)

You say this in spite of the evidence to the contrary? Dicklyon (talk) 22:42, 14 May 2016 (UTC

Your evidence to the contrary is an old, back in the day, rapidly converging 2008 n-gram. Don't need a crystal ball to know how that one turned out. The Montgomery Bus Boycott is not a bus boycott, but the Bus Boycott, now known as such through the pages sources, search engine results, and common sense. Wikipedia is now the outlier on this one, because of an RM which was started and literally based on an incorrect n-gram. Randy Kryn 23:52, 14 May 2016 (UTC)

To the extend that capitalization was increasing in the 2002–2008 timeframe, it's likely that wikipedia was the cause. An awful lot of the more recent (21st century) books are either wikipedia copies or influenced by wikipedia. Looking at more recent book stats would be increasingly problematic in terms of being polluted with what we do here. Dicklyon (talk) 01:57, 15 May 2016 (UTC)

Randy Krin, please stop this campaign to overcapitalise on a poor evidentiary base. It's doing no one any good. Tony (talk) 23:25, 14 May 2016 (UTC)

I would if my objections were based on a "poor evidentiary base", but they aren't, just the opposite. When they are, such as with the Chicago open housing movement (which I was surprised about and then actually lower-cased it on templates), I agree. So there is no campaign to upper case as much as defending against what seems like a campaign to rid Wikipedia of a proper emphasis on major social events, especially landmarks in history such as the Montgomery Bus Boycott, by lower-casing long standing articles. Randy Kryn 23:52, 14 May 2016 (UTC)

The Right Honourable The Baroness Thatcher

Latest comment: 7 years ago7 comments3 people in discussion

Is this correct? Or should it be "the Right Honourable the Baroness Thatcher" (unless it starts a sentence, of course)? And why? I now see that in "Titles of people" the guideline says: "Honorifics and styles of nobility should normally be capitalized, e.g., Her Majesty, His Holiness.” And that Royal and noble styles says: "Earls, countesses, viscounts, viscountesses, barons, and baronesses bear the styles of The Right Honourable and Lordship." So I'm assuming capital T for The is correct in both cases here? Many thanks. Martinevans123 (talk) 21:52, 3 May 2016 (UTC)

We should use lower-case "the" (unless it starts a sentence/heading), since that's proper English. I would think "the Right Honourable Baroness Thatcher" would actually be preferable, but I don't follow peerage address stuff in detail. Maybe it is genuinely conventional to retain the redundant second "the". One would want to see sources for that, though (current ones, not ones from 1830, heh). If some heraldic specialty sources insist that the second "the" should be capitalised, but mainstream (British and other Commonwealth) sources don't go along with that in practice, we should ignore the overcapitalisation oddity as a WP:Specialized-style fallacy. — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼ 09:11, 5 May 2016 (UTC)

Perhaps info boxes are allowed to have special rules? Else you may wish to comment over at Margaret Thatcher? Martinevans123 (talk) 09:26, 5 May 2016 (UTC)

Why would infoboxes or anything else have "special rules"? All that would do it lead to increased and further conflict. The entire point of a site-wide style guide is to not drown the article-improvement talk pages of article after article with rehash debates about the same tedious style matters again and again. — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼ 02:44, 9 May 2016 (UTC)

I see no issue at Margaret Thatcher, where the info heading starts with "The". Dicklyon (talk) 03:13, 9 May 2016 (UTC)

Lowercase "the" is by far most common in books. Dicklyon (talk) 03:10, 9 May 2016 (UTC)

Yes it starts with The and then it has a second The: "The Right Honourable The Baroness Thatcher". So this is fine, then? Even though, it conflicts with the style guide, and even though there are no "special rules" for anything, including infoboxes? Martinevans123 (talk) 22:04, 24 May 2016 (UTC)

US state governors & lieutenant governors

Latest comment: 7 years ago27 comments7 people in discussion

Clarify: Which is correct at Doug Ducey, for example. Is it 23rd and current Governor of Arizona? or 23rd and current governor of Arizona? GoodDay (talk) 02:09, 13 May 2016 (UTC)

Governor would be capitalized in "Governor Doug Ducey", but not in "governor of Arizona" unless for a heading or title in some styles. See n-grams. Dicklyon (talk) 02:29, 13 May 2016 (UTC)

FWIW, most bios on Wikipedia go with capitalization, concerning offices. GoodDay (talk) 02:44, 13 May 2016 (UTC)

Yes, when the title is part of a proper name phrase with the name, per Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style#Titles_of_people. Dicklyon (talk) 04:17, 13 May 2016 (UTC)

According to the "King of France" example "Governor of Arizona" is the preferred style. Primergrey (talk) 05:06, 14 May 2016 (UTC)

That example is actually pretty unclear and ambiguous, and is introduced with the phrase "When the correct formal title is treated as a proper name..." I wonder what the intent is there. After "23rd and current" I would expect a generic, not a proper. Dicklyon (talk) 02:03, 15 May 2016 (UTC)

I've always read it as pretty clear, "King of France, French king".Primergrey (talk) 03:14, 15 May 2016 (UTC)

And what about articles like "List of Governors of X" and "List of Presidents of X"? Is there any reasonable support for caps there, or are those just mistakes waiting to be fixed? Dicklyon (talk) 02:13, 15 May 2016 (UTC)

I think in those examples downcasing would be appropriate because of the plural forms.Primergrey (talk) 03:14, 15 May 2016 (UTC)

Generic, therefore downcased. Tony (talk) 06:12, 15 May 2016 (UTC)

Agreed. I wonder if the thinking has matured since the 2012 RMs at Talk:List_of_Federal_Presidents_of_Austria#Requested_move and Talk:List_of_Presidents_of_Brazil#Requested_move. Dicklyon (talk) 06:43, 15 May 2016 (UTC)

They should also be downcased. I've seen downcased articles in that category. Tony (talk) 08:44, 15 May 2016 (UTC)

Someone needs to figure out how the "King of France" example made it into the text if all these titles are generic w/o a name after them. As it is, I get enough resistance trying to downcase things like "Australian Prime Minister". I have a hard time seeing how "prime minister of Australia" is going to get any traction.Primergrey (talk) 13:25, 15 May 2016 (UTC)

To the contrary, I would strongly suggest simply removing it. Far too much drama has been generated trying to identify who to blame for one poorly-thought-out thing or another in MoS (or whatever other policypage) and take them to task for it. If MoS says something confusing or contradictory, let's just repair it and move on. It's not important whose fault the minor damage could be traced to. — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼ 16:24, 29 May 2016 (UTC)

Cleanup the guideline conflict with clearer wording and examples

The confusion is resulting from a contradictory wording across several guidelines, due to minor WP:POVFORKing from MOS:CAPS. Both WP:MOS#Manual of Style#Titles of people and MOS:BIO#Occupation titles (which do not have shortcuts, so people don't read them often, and not-good changes go unnoticed at them more easily) questionably and confusingly suggest that a formal title can (certainly not "must") be capitalized even when not used directly with the name, immediately after saying not to do that. But in all cases, it illustrates doing so with heads of state (in the nation-state sense), and using the formal titles (albeit not the longest possible ones), not paraphrases.

An argument can be made that governors do not rise to this level, and we should thus treat this as we would any other job title or occupational descriptor, as a lower-cased common noun. However, I think this draws the line in the wrong place. The's a difference between titles of formal governmental offices (democratic or otherwise) and "assistant manager at Falafel Shack". Public office, in the broad sense (e.g. including military, part of the public sector) titles are given a bit more formal treatment, more often, in more RS, than private sector job titles, which are often whimsical ("solution evangelist", etc.)

There's also, perhaps more importantly, a grammatical usage line to draw, of the title being used as part of the name. Making this line clearer would be more consistent with a) MOS:CAPS and its instructions to default to lowercase when usage is mixed, and b) increasingly consistent movement away from this capitalization both on and off Wikipedia. For example, a generation ago, "President" was virtually always capitalized, at least in US sources, when referring to the US presidency, even in adjective form ("Presidential", along with "Senatorial", "Congressional", etc.), but this is not the norm today at all; the published, written language has notably changed in this regard. Journalistic sources (versus more formal ones like book publishing) are more apt to capitalize in a construction like "Barack Obama, in his Senatorial career before his Presidential terms, was ...". To more widely-read eyes, this looks amateurish, aggrandizing, and stilted. It's a style we should avoid. It should be tolerated only when it's the formal title or a very conventional direct truncation of it (e.g. "President of the United States [of America]". In the case at issue here, the formal title is actually "Governor of the State of Arizona", so we should not be capitalizing paraphrases of it, like "governor of Arizona", "Arizona governor", "state governor of Arizona", "governor of the US state of Arizona", etc. Finally, under no circumstances should we be capitalizing such words in article titles like "List of governors of X" or "List of presidents of Y"; that's use as a common noun by definition.

Action item: both the main MOS page and MOS:BIO need to be revised to stop conflicting with MOS:CAPS on this, and to only recommend this capitalization when the title is directly juxtaposed with the name, or when it is a the use of a formal name of a public office, especially in a words-as-words manner.

To spell it out in guideline-usable wording (probably for MOS:BIO):

Directly juxtaposed with name: Capitalize the title of an elected, appointed, or hereditary government office when directly attached to the person's name: 44th President of the United States Barack Obama, Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne (technically a proper name, Ontario, followed by the short-title + personal-name combination Premier Kathleen Wynne), Prem. Wynne, Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom, Queen Elizabeth. This does not include non-administrative job titles (e.g. FBI switchboard operator, army mining engineer, etc.). It does including titles of military and treaty-organization (UN, EU, etc.) administrative office.
Do not capitalize if the juxtaposition is broken by words or a comma (the US president, Barack Obama, Barack Obama, the US president, Doug Ducey, currently the governor of Arizona. Note the difference between the UK's long-reigning Queen Elizabeth II and the UK's long-reigning queen, Elizabeth II; the entire character of these constructions is different, with the second implying that the reader may not know the queen's name, and is not necessary even if this assumption will be true sometimes.

Exception for commas: Capitalize the formal title after a comma if the comma is a required part of the style of the title (Elizabeth II, Queen of the United Kingdom).

Exception for word-separation: (

Do not capitalize informal, non-conventional, figurative, or descriptive constructions: American leader Obama, Ontario political boss Wynn, British monarch Elizabeth II.

Do not capitalize if plural, in which case it is being used as a common noun: former presidents Ford and Carter, governors Ducey of Arizona and Brown of California (note that this matches lowercase plural usage with collective entities: the city councils of Johannesburg and Cape Town), queens Elizabeth I and II. Exception: When the office is innately plural, and all then-current holders are specified: Triumvirs Julius Caesar, Pompey, and Marcus Crassius, but triumvirs Caesar and Pomey.

Do not capitalize if the grammatical function has been changed: Obama's presidential term, Wynn's premiership, Elizabeth II's queenly bearing.
Reference to a formal title in a words-as-words manner (i.e. writing about the title as such), separated from the name: Capitalization is permissible (but not required): Barack Obama is the two-term, 44th President of the United States, Doug Ducey is the incumbent Governor of the State of Arizona, Kathleen Wynne has been the Premier of Ontario since early 2013, Elizabeth II has many titles, including Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. This does not apply to any other cases; to wit:
- Do not capitalize if it is used as a role description not a name element: Obama's term as president ends in early 2017, Elizabeth II is still the queen of the United Kingdom (contrast Elizabeth II is still Queen of the United Kingdom, a title-as-such usage).
- Do not capitalize alterations of the formal title or its standard shortening: Obama is the American president, Doug Ducey is the governor of the US state of Arizona, Elizabeth II is the monarch of the UK.
- Do not capitalize if the title is being used explicitly as a common noun (e.g. in a comparison): Obama was the United States' first president of color, Wynne is Canada's first openly homosexual premier, Elizabeth II has been the UK's most popular queen in history.
Commercial and organizational job titles: Do not capitalize such a title at all (Apple CEO and former chairman Steve Jobs), except when it is being explicitly referred to as such: Steve Jobs's title at Apple until 1997 was Chairman of the Board; upon his return in 1997, he took the title CEO (in an interim capacity until 2000); but according to Electronic Frontier Foundation executive director Cindy Cohn.

This could be enriched a bit with an ecclesiastical title example.

Before anyone goes on yet another time-wasting "source the MoS!" windmill-tilting exercise and time-and-productivity black hole, the bare fact of the matter is that there is no consistent standard in English. Every style guide says something different. What is discernible is that the high-academic style extreme tends to avoid all such capitalization unless it is integrated directly with the person's name (not even a comma), and sometimes only when used in front of the name, though this varies by field-specific guide (humanities ones are less anti-caps). Journalistic style leans towards overcapitalization (especially in the lower registers of that genre, like entertainment press, which will happily capitalize job titles like "Dolly Grip"; this is a WP:Specialized-style fallacy, of course). Higher-end news publishing is leaning further and further away from this, even for "traditionally" over-capped things like "president" in the US governance sense.

So, we have an overall, prevailing principle that if in doubt, if usage is mixed, do not capitalize. This view, increasingly shared by other publishers, and known as "down style" (found in Chicago Manual of Style, Garner's Modern English Usage, and other major paper-publishing style manuals), is what I'm basing the above suggestions on. It avoids capitalizing except where off-WP usage pretty consistently still uses it. — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼ 03:03, 16 May 2016 (UTC)

I'm pretty sure that this "down style" is most in agreement with Wikipedia's style in general, as represented at MOS:CAPS. I suggest we try to make this more clear, and start to fix some of these unnecessary caps. Dicklyon (talk) 03:23, 16 May 2016 (UTC)

You do realize there is more than one point of view, right? That not everyone takes that 'consistent' language to mean each and every single time, which is where logic bumps into the common sense reality of exceptions and precedents and more to a close than looking at ancient n-grams. There possibly should be weight given to such things as real-world structures and their real names, and social structures and their real names, etc. That said, what SMcandlish has written above seems well researched and thought out for article titles pertaining to officials and governmental office holders. Randy Kryn 3:35, 16 May 2016 (UTC)

I think the following needs clarifying:

"Do not capitalize alterations of the formal title or its standard shortening: Obama is the American president, Doug Ducey is the governor of the US state of Arizona, Elizabeth II is the monarch of the UK."

It is clear for the examples given, since the nouns are being used as common nouns,in their normal meaning (president, governor, monarch). What is more contentious is the use of lower case for compound titles that have no non-specific meaning or a different meaning from that usually intended by the individual words used to form the title (e.g. Foreign Secretary). --Boson (talk) 22:32, 24 May 2016 (UTC)

That term should be rendered "foreign secretary", unless directly before a person's name. It is no different from "foreign minister". Keep in mind that "foreign secretary" is not even an official title of any kind, merely a description. RGloucester — ☎ 23:06, 24 May 2016 (UTC)

My main point is that - provided this is the consensus view - the examples should unambiguously illustrate the principles being applied, and the text should perhaps make it clearer. There are, of course, "pragmatic" arguments for using the capitalized form only when preceding a personal name – regardless of whether the term is used descriptively – but your raising this point illustrates the problem with the proposed text and examples. It might be appropriate to also offer guidance, somewhere, that includes Black Rod (the shortened form of Gentleman Usher of the Black Rod) so as to better differentiate the principles being applied (or not applied). As I understand the proposed text, it would require the article titles Prime minister of the United Kingdom and Prime minister of the Australia on the grounds that they are shortened forms.--Boson (talk) 12:59, 25 May 2016 (UTC)

Article titles have no connection to the MoS. You're looking for WP:NCCAPS. RGloucester — ☎ 15:41, 26 May 2016 (UTC)

That's a very weird thing to say. You'd cap it one way in the article and a different way in the title? Dicklyon (talk) 15:58, 26 May 2016 (UTC)

If there is a conflict between NCCAPS and MOSCAPS, NCCAPS is the one to follow for article titles, and MOSCAPS for prose. I'm not saying there is a conflict, as I haven't looked into it. However, I do not consider that this guideline here is intended to govern usage in titles, and it is conceivable that article titles might be capitalised differently from usage in prose. If I'm honest, I prefer "prime minister of the United Kingdom" in both cases. RGloucester — ☎ 16:05, 26 May 2016 (UTC)

But there should never be a conflict. Note that NCCAPS says, among other things "[WP] has carefully built its WP:Manual of Style (MoS) to address modern, global encyclopedic writing and reading needs. Please consult in particular its sections on capital letters and, when relevant, on trademarks." Dicklyon (talk) 17:55, 26 May 2016 (UTC)

I agree that there should never be a conflict, but I disagree if you think that there isn't the potential for one. RGloucester — ☎ 17:57, 26 May 2016 (UTC)

So does this mean the following?

The article title should be Black rod (since it should not be treated as or like a proper name).
Independently of that, the body of the article should have text such as

"The black rod for the Senate of Canada is well-known ..."
"Either black rod or his deputy, the yeoman usher, is required to be present when the House of Lords, the upper house of parliament, is in session ..."
"In the United Kingdom, black rod is responsible for maintaining ..."
"Black rod is an officer of the English Order of the Garter ..."
"List of black rods in England, Great Britain and the UK from 1361 "
" Sir Augustus W.J. Clifford]], 1st Bt, as black rod." [caption]
"Black rod is formally appointed by the crown based on a recruitment search performed by the Clerk of the Parliaments ..."

--Boson (talk) 19:26, 27 May 2016 (UTC)

Avoid telegraphic writing. Use "the black rod". Using "black rod" by itself implies that is a mass noun, a substance or undifferentiated mass, as in "I like black rod with my asparagus almost as much as I like brown rice". — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼ 16:19, 29 May 2016 (UTC)

I think you have misunderstood this usage. It is not telegraphic writing. The holder of the office is normally known as Black Rod (although he is currently white and is not called Rodney). See http://www.parliament.uk/about/mps-and-lords/principal/black-rod/

The black rod is the symbol of authority that he holds in his hand, and might also be used to indicate a different instance (e.g. the Black Rod in other Commonwealth countries). --Boson (talk) 17:41, 29 May 2016 (UTC)

Leader of the opposition

Latest comment: 7 years ago6 comments3 people in discussion

Xxxx became prime minister. Xxxx became leader of the opposition. That looks right to me. Have I missed something? An editor has reversed my move of Leader of the Opposition (United Kingdom) to Leader of the opposition (United Kingdom), putting it back to the overcapitalized form. Chris the speller ^yack 20:20, 24 May 2016 (UTC)

I can see an argument for distinguishing between the (capitalized) title, whether in its official long form or the form normally used, as opposed to the descriptive term using the common nouns leader and opposition. Since common nouns normally have their usual meaning, it could also be regarded as POV to claim that the person bearing that title is in fact the leader of the opposition. --Boson (talk) 21:40, 24 May 2016 (UTC)

The Google Books corpus suggests that there may be a BE/AE difference in usage. --Boson (talk) 22:00, 24 May 2016 (UTC)

It has been pointed out to me that this case may be similar to Speaker of the House, which is always capitalized. It may be a good idea for the guide to include a couple of examples that are always capitalized, unlike king and pope. Chris the speller ^yack 13:29, 25 May 2016 (UTC)

This is essentially the exact same issue as the one in the thread immediately above this. We do not have to have the same "can I capitalize this job title because I like to capitalize a lot?" discussion for every different job title. — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼ 16:16, 29 May 2016 (UTC)

I think that is an oversimplification. It is not just a difference of opinion between people who like to capitalize a lot and those who don't. It is more a difference of opinion between those who prefer simpler rules that avoid subtle differences of interpretation and the appearance of inconsistency (and make life easier for typesetters and copy-editors) and those who want rules that agree with many people's intuitive sense of the difference between proper names and common nouns. --Boson (talk) 23:28, 29 May 2016 (UTC)