Help talk:Naming Conventions/Capitalization Archive

Capitalisation

Should words like and/of/the/etc. which are normally not capitalised in titles be capitalised here? I notice there is, frex, Age Of Sail, but 6 Degrees of Canada. My preference is for the latter, both because that is standard capitalisation for titles and because there are more pages that way than pages the other way.

Also, what about pages whose title comes from an article, such as "Fan fiction: do you write it?" All lowercase as it is or renamed with proper capitalisation? --Kyuuketsukirui 21:37, 17 October 2008 (UTC)

I'm really glad you said this because it's become a serious point of annoyance. Prepositions and conjunctions are generally not capitalized in most publications, even on the web, and I think there are a lot of pages that should have lowercase "the"s and "and"s and so on -- The Fast and the Furious is a big one, because the fandom is abbreviated with a lowercase a and t (TFatF). I'd like us to revise that instruction!--gwyn 06:12, 19 October 2008 (UTC)

I strongly feel that we should use the source's capitalisation (or lack thereof). So far what I've done where the I didin't know the original capitalisation (creating articles about newspaper pieces wehre I was retrieving information from an online database) is use sentence case. -- Kdcat 06:51, 19 October 2008 (UTC)

I'm sympathetic to this POV, and will bring it up with the wiki comm. I know the counter-argument is that 'capitalize all the words' is very simple to parse, whereas Title Case can cause some disagreements or be harder to remember. --Betty 16:05, 19 October 2008 (UTC)

Which is not to cut off discussion! Please feel free to weigh in, we want to reflect user preferences. --Betty 16:58, 19 October 2008 (UTC)

I would prefer not to capitalize prepositions in article titles. I do think if we go with title case we need to specify the exact rules to use, because there are different versions used in different styles/publications. --Penknife 20:52, 19 October 2008 (UTC)

Capitalizing Each Word feels deeply wrong to me. Actually, I cannot bring myself to move pages like The Adventures of an Angel to, say, The Adventures Of An Angel. In terms of work, I don't think the latter is preferrable, because we mostly move pages due to *no* capitalization instead of wrong capitalization. However, it seems as if it would stop a lot of bleeding hearts if we adopted Title Case :) --lian 05:24, 20 October 2008 (UTc)

oh, yeah, not to mention that on the page itself, the capitalization is inconsistent. Archive of Our Own (the correct name!) vs., as Archive Of Our Own Just thinking og Lord Of The Rings hurts my brain. So, you know. I don't really see any convincing argument supporting complete capitalization -- experience here as shown that people will simply not capitalizer, at all, and we need to move pages/create redirects for alternative spellings anyway. --lian 14:22, 8 December 2008 (UTC)

Doujinshi titles

This is incredibly helpful - Thanks for putting this guide together. I do have a question for doujinshi titles (since I'm working on doujinshi now): Some doujinshi titles don't follow English "title case" conventions. Should I name the article to match the cover of the doujinshi (like RECESSES)? -Jaetion 21:10, 1 October 2010 (UTC)

When in doubt, go with the capitalization that the doujinshi title uses rather than the title case convention. (Though I usually interpret an all-caps title as a font choice for covers that may or may not reflect the "actual" capitalization of the title, I don't know anything about doujinshi.) --æthel 22:18, 2 October 2010 (UTC)

Thanks for the input! Capitalization's a confusing concept. I agree that the all caps or all small-caps titles might just be for style, but I dunno. Got another question - Any idea which words should be capitalized in Romanized titles? - Jaetion 00:08, 3 October 2010 (UTC)

You ask all the hard questions! I... have no idea. If there is a standard capitalization rule for Romanized titles, you could use it instead of English title case.--æthel 17:15, 3 October 2010 (UTC)