Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Capital letters/Archive 32

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Proposed update to MOSCAPS regarding racial terms

The following discussion 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.


The Associated Press recently updated its style guide so that "Black" as in "Black people" should now be capitalized.[1] Should we apply those same changes to our MoS? Should similar racial terms, such as "White" be capitalized as well? –LaundryPizza03 (d) 05:30, 21 June 2020 (UTC)

LaundryPizza03, Where is this discussion taking place? I could not locate a link to it. Thanks. FULBERT (talk) 15:24, 21 June 2020 (UTC)
The problem I've always had with this is that it raises the specter of capitalizing White, which has been used ... um ... problematically at times. EEng 19:02, 21 June 2020 (UTC)
The AP announcement is here. A discussion of the appropriateness of writing Black but not White is here. I think it's too soon to propose a change in the guideline, the announcement is only two days old.Peter Gulutzan (talk) 19:42, 21 June 2020 (UTC)
And the AP hasn't yet determined whether to capitalize "white" as a racial designation. Dhtwiki (talk) 22:37, 21 June 2020 (UTC)
Has this been resolved? Swiftestcat (talk) 03:48, 9 September 2020 (UTC)

I don't think we need to wait. Capital B has already become the standard at a number of media organizations and publishers, AP is a bit late to the game and it is already commonly used in Wikipedia article - there is just a lack of consistency that needs to be rectified. Capitalizing "W" in white is non-standard as the usage is different, Black people are a self-identified (and externally identified) ethnic group or people. White people remain more likely to identify themselves either as European or by a particular ethnicity eg English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh (or British), French, German, Italian, Russian etc. This may change and if "White" becomes more widespread we may need to revisit that. See for instance this explanation from the Columbia Journalism Review: "we capitalize Black, and not white, when referring to groups in racial, ethnic, or cultural terms. For many people, Black reflects a shared sense of identity and community. White carries a different set of meanings; capitalizing the word in this context risks following the lead of white supremacists." 104.247.241.28 (talk) 13:43, 23 June 2020 (UTC)

The fact that there are "white supremacists" means that there are certainly those who self-identify, or are identified by others, as "white" (as if that wasn't the case all along); and the particular sin at the white supremacist websites seems to be that they write "White" while writing "black", the mirror image of what we would do here if we were to capitalize one but not the other, especially if the practice is made inflexible. I know of at least one article, White Latin Americans that does it both ways within the article but is not inconsistent within sections ("white" and "black" or "White" and "Black" within sentences, paragraphs, and sections). Dhtwiki (talk) 04:57, 27 June 2020 (UTC)

It does not matter what AP does. What matters is what the majority of RSs do.

MOS:CAPS: "Wikipedia avoids unnecessary capitalization ... only words and phrases that are consistently capitalized in a substantial majority of independent, reliable sources are capitalized in Wikipedia." – Finnusertop (talkcontribs
) 15:00, 26 June 2020 (UTC)

References

  1. ^ Press, Associated (20 June 2020). "Associated Press changes influential style guide to capitalize 'Black'". The Guardian. Retrieved 21 June 2020.

The NYT now uppercases "Black". More detail on that decision and the request by the immediate past president of the National Association of Black Journalists:

courtesy collapsed

Based on those discussions, we’ve decided to adopt the change and start using uppercase “Black” to describe people and cultures of African origin, both in the United States and elsewhere. We believe this style best conveys elements of shared history and identity, and reflects our goal to be respectful of all the people and communities we cover.

The change will match what many readers are seeing elsewhere. The Associated Press and other major news organizations have recently adopted “Black,” which has long been favored by many African-American publications and other outlets. The new style is also consistent with our treatment of many other racial and ethnic terms: We recently decided to capitalize “Native” and “Indigenous,” while other ethnic terms like “Asian-American” and “Latino” have always been capitalized.

We will retain lowercase treatment for “white.” While there is an obvious question of parallelism, there has been no comparable movement toward widespread adoption of a new style for “white,” and there is less of a sense that “white” describes a shared culture and history. Moreover, hate groups and white supremacists have long favored the uppercase style, which in itself is reason to avoid it.
— The Times will start using uppercase “Black” to describe people and cultures of African origin, both in the U.S. and elsewhere. Read more in this note from Dean Baquet and Phil Corbett.

Black is an encompassing term that is readily used to refer to African Americans, people of Caribbean descent and people of African origin worldwide. Capitalizing the “B” in Black should become standard use to describe people, culture, art and communities. We already capitalize Asian, Hispanic, African American and Native American.
This step is a good first step to affirm the significance of being Black in America. This matters. It’s to bring humanity to a group of people who have experienced forms of oppression and discrimination since they first came to the United States 401 years ago as enslaved people. I ask for this change in honor of the Black Press, which already capitalizes the “B” in Black, and in honor of the legacy of the 44 brave men and women who founded the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) in 1975.
— One Thing Newsrooms Can Do: Capitalize "B" When Reporting About the Black Community". New York Amsterdam News. (by Sarah Glover, immediate past president of the National Association of Black Journalists)

I think it'd be worth making this a formal RfC now. (not

ping}}) czar
01:48, 4 July 2020 (UTC)

NYT does not now consistently uppercase "Black" [1]. They just permit it to be capitalized (alone or with "White", "Brown") in op-eds and other opinion pieces, and they capitalize the entire name "Black Lives Matter", same as they do with "Occupy Wall Street" and other named movements. They may have, early on, announced an intention to follow AP on this, but they are not actually doing it, probably due to objections, though I doubt they'll be very clear about why they're quietly backing off from it.  — SMcCandlish ¢ 😼  18:52, 19 August 2020 (UTC)
@SMcCandlish: check your dates. The NYT's editors' note was published on June 30, five days after the op-ed you linked to. The decision to capitalize "Black" in this context was announced in the paper itself on July 5. Since then, they do in fact use the uppercase "B", e.g. [2][3][4]. —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 20:41, 31 August 2020 (UTC)
Ah, I see. Well, it's just one publisher and isn't dispositive of what WP should do, nor what professional writers across English (and they style guides they follow and help shape) are doing. This "capitalize Black and that only" thing is a US-centric and highly politicized knee-jerk reaction to racist politics and racial-justice activism of the last 6 months or so, and is even counter to the broader language-usage reforms pushed by progressives for years (which would treat "Brown" and "White" the same way, and had already been gaining substantial traction and not just in the US – this is basically a conflict between multiple progressive/left factions what has not even been resolved in that sector yet, much less to a new global-English norm). Aside from the
WP:CIRCULAR problem: we've already seen evidence many times that WP's own style choices end up having a strong effect on the blogosphere and even on mainstream publishers; e.g., over-capitalization of a subject on WP leads to a clearly observable spike in unnecessary capitalization of the same thing in other publications, which can be directly tracked with tools like Google Ngrams).

Anyway, NYT publishes (on a very slow cycle) its own style guide, which is widely divergent from others even in journalism, and has little effect on writing outside their own newsroom. While NYT is not quite as stylistically aberrant on so many things as The New Yorker (which says it gets more mail from readers about one of these quibbles than about any other subject!), it's still on that side of the fence; like The Economist and a few other publishers, they intentionally diverge from mainstream publishing norms as a means of branding/distinction. Not a single thing in MoS is based on NYT style, and MoS does not jump onto any style-shift bandwagons until they become norms reflected in the majority of the style guides that MoS is actually based on (Chicago, Hart's, Scientific Style and Format, Fowler's and Garner's), which is generally a 5–10 year shift cycle. This is why, e.g., WP was slow to adopt singular they vs. awkwardness like he/she or treating he as generic, a preference for US over U.S., and dropping the comma before Jr. or Sr. in a name, despite them already having become more common than the alternatives in mainstream writing.
 — SMcCandlish ¢

 😼  04:42, 1 September 2020 (UTC)

So the NYT style was "good enough" for WP when it was lowercasing both, but now the NYT capitalizing "Black" is not dispositive of what we should do? Seems like you're arguing against yourself here. See my additional reply under #Extended discussion below. —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 21:39, 4 September 2020 (UTC)
Many newsrooms are now capitalizing the B in Black.[1]
AP: The decision to capitalize Black.[2]
The NY Times: Why We’re Capitalizing Black.[3]
FOX News Media to capitalize 'Black'.[4]
Why hundreds of American newsrooms have started capitalizing the ‘b’ in ‘Black’.[5]
2600:1000:B031:3E57:C563:E6:7258:A121 (talk)
"Many newsrooms" just assiduously follow
clear, formal policy, so "lots of newspapers do it and new style guides like it" is a useless argument in an MoS discussion. When most academic book publishers consistently do something and their style guides, like Chicago Manual of Style and New Hart's Rules (AKA New Oxford Style Manual), on which it MoS is primarily based, say also to do it, then there's a good argument for WP to do it.  — SMcCandlish ¢
 😼  04:42, 1 September 2020 (UTC)
The Chicago Manual of Style now advises capitalizing "Black". See #Update below. —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 01:18, 26 September 2020 (UTC)
  • Comment For context on other similar terms: Note also that The New York Times explicitly does not capitalize "brown" or "white" but the AP are issuing a decision on "white" soon. Other sources are explicit about capitalizing "Black" but not "white" (e.g.) but remain silent on other things capitalized by the AP such as "Indigenous". See also, e.g. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/06/time-to-capitalize-blackand-white/613159/. If the RfC is narrowly about "B/black", then I don't think it's going to go anywhere as it will inevitably get derailed around "B/brown", "I/indigenous", "W/white", etc. Unfortunately, this is one of those times when you have to make the RfC more broad to get better responses. ―Justin (koavf)TCM 00:28, 9 July 2020 (UTC)

Notes

  1. ^ The way people use "black" has more to due with Limpieza and the Nuremberg Laws than any rational classification
Some overly detailed back-and-forth:
      • "Heading off ambiguity" applies equally to capitalizing White and Brown as ethnical labels, obviously. So, no, that is not at all a rationale for capitalizing Black and Black only; it's a rationale for moving away from lower-case for these labels, as a class. That some news publishers are doing this in piecemeal fashion tells us nothing about what WP should do. On the rest of this, I don't see what point you're trying to make. Whether the racialist "color labels" have a political origin isn't under question, and not relevant; they are in two cases in overwhelming use with a third (Brown) in some use (while some others like Yellow and Red are now basically taboo). So WP will tend to use the two common ones, absent a compelling reason to add them to
        WP:NOT#NEWS policy), and MoS is based on academic style guides not any news ones, so which news publishers prefer what is simply irrelevant, except to establish left-wing bias in this "capitalize one only" practice, and to demonstrate that this supposed sea change is not at all consistent across them, and is even counter to long-standing progressive efforts to capitalize uniformly instead of using lower case. Basically, we have blundered into a confused and nowhere near settled sudden slapping-each-other contest between left-wing factions, and WP's job is to ignore it, or to cover it neutrally if it rises to encyclopedia-worthiness, not pick a side and join in the socio-political pissing match. We especially do not leap to sudden "popular" changes in style matters, but wait for the major, academic style guides MoS is actually based on to mostly or entirely settle on something, which they only do after a new norm has clearly emerged among the majority of high-end academic publishers. Even then, we may reject such a change if we have encyclopedic neutrality or accuracy reasons to do so. Otherwise we would probably need no style guide beyond "follow Chicago for American English, or Oxford for British/Commonwealth, and beware the following short list of technical restrictions imposed by the software." But we obviously have a much more nuanced style manual than this, custom tailored to WP's purpose and our globalized and "ultra-general" audience.

        WP's writing is especially geared to precision (disambiguation) and avoidance of bias. This makes "Black and White" the obvious first choice (aside from avoiding these terms altogether), and "Black and white" the obvious last choice, with "black and white" being okay and our normal mode to date, since it is what is most often done in high-register English, like books and journals from respected academic presses. No option can possibly please everyone. For my part: like most people with an anthropology- and linguistics-enhanced education, I've already been writing "Black and White" as ethnicity labels for a long time. I just don't force that here, since it is not (yet) WP's house style.
         — SMcCandlish ¢

         😼  05:55, 1 September 2020 (UTC)

SMcCandlish I am in the process of creating a style guide for Australian articles on this very topic, and countrywide RS style guides use capitals for Indigenous and Aboriginal, use Aboriginal people in place of Aboriginals or Aborigines (only using the latter when quoting historical usage). (Incidentally, Indigenous includes both Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.) The other convention is to always use the group name (e.g. Kaurna) where the individual has identified themselves as such, or the language being talked about is specific. Just FYI. :-) I'm just not sure where is a good place to place the style guide when complete - at the moment, it's in the Australian project pages. Laterthanyouthink (talk) 02:41, 20 November 2020 (UTC)
Digression about the Bible, NYT, and movement names:
  • The Bible does not generally capitalize those pronouns; it does so in reference to Jesus and God ("His mercy", etc.). And we would not capitalize "Man", "Woman", "Child" because they are not ethno-cultural names, just everyday categorization labels like "tree" and "asteroid" and "elbow". NYT does not generally capitalize "black" [33] (though they permit it in op-eds and other personal editorials/opinion pieces); they're capitalizing "Black Lives Matter" as a proper-name phrase for a semi-organized movement, like Anonymous (the hacking group) and Occupy Wall Street.  — SMcCandlish ¢ 😼  18:43, 19 August 2020 (UTC)
The Bible is not written in English. Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz Username:Chatul (talk) 22:12, 31 August 2020 (UTC)
Of course it is, if you're reading an English-translation edition. All of them are entirely consistent on this. (What Jesus said was "His word", what Moses said was "his word").  — SMcCandlish ¢ 😼  02:15, 27 October 2020 (UTC)
At the end of the day, they don't actually identify any cohesive groups as skin color is a spectrum. They do serve as clunky political terms but I'm not entirely convinced that their capitalization in the media is enough to justify capitalization in an encyclopedia. Encyclopedias should be rigid and slow to change, but moreover, immune to political whims. I think Wikipedia should wait about 10 years and see what the rest of the populace does. -- sarysa (talk) 01:13, 28 September 2020 (UTC)

Extended discussion

BBC: "Now, we're the core and centre of black British music and have been for the past 11 years."
USA Today: “Union, a black woman, was singled out”
Financial Times: "Mbali Ntuli, 32, would be only the second black leader in the troubled liberal party’s 20-year history"
ABC-9: “With the goal to mobilize black men to support racial justice”}}
The Vanderbilt Hustler: “it is necessary for black students to have a safe space on campus”
The Guardian: “ Josh talks to black fans, writers and critics about how they view racism”
XavierItzm (talk) 10:21, 4 October 2020 (UTC)
That USA Today quote is not a statement by the author, but a direct quotation from a discrimination complaint filed by the subject of the article. I'm not sure why the rest of these were posted here, since none of them besides USA Today announced that they would capitalize "Black" (and the inclusion of a student newspaper doesn't seem relevant to anything). —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 20:10, 4 October 2020 (UTC)
Plus it's just as easy to cherry-pick a list of counter examples, and it's already clear that the claim that "the majority of RSes" are doing "Black but white" is false. I see "black and white" or "Black and White" every single day (unless I read no news). The Washington Post's apparent new standard (if they have one, or maybe it's just what their writers are doing without any policy) is "Black and White", as one such example. (I provided a bunch more, above, in another later post today.) And even at papers that said they had a new policy of "Black but white", I keep seeing instances of "Black and White" because various writers are not going along with it and editors are either not noticing or not fighting them over it. As I said at Reconstruction era, the fact that they are serving as proper names for major groups of people is meaningful. It's silly and jarring that the article had "South[ern[ers]]", "North[ern[ers]]", "Colored[s]", "Negro[es]", "Republicans", "Democrats", "Southern Democrats", "African Americans", "European Americans", "Baptists", "Union[ists]", "Confedera[cy|tes]", etc., etc., all capitalized, yet the only two names for massive groups of people that were not capitalized were "white[s]" and "black[s]". And even that was not consistent; various editors of the article had been veering back and forth, with "White" and "Black" occurring at random. So I just normalized it all to "Black" and "White", based on the proper-naming-consistency logic I just laid out, and on this discussion very clearly not coming to a consensus to use "Black but white". (And that edit has stuck, so far, along with a bunch of other cleanup I did, mostly of inconsistent citations and dates and such.)  — SMcCandlish ¢ 😼  16:30, 26 October 2020 (UTC); rev'd. 02:15, 27 October 2020 (UTC)

@SMcCandlish: I read the news every day, and I have never seen "White" (unless combined with a proper noun) and I seldom see "Black", and only in relation to America (that is, the US). All, or almost all, the examples quoted "South[ern[ers]]", "North[ern[ers]]", "Colored[s]", "Negro[es]", "Republicans", "Democrats", "Southern Democrats", "African Americans", "European Americans", "Baptists", "Union[ists]", "Confedera[cy are again American-only terms. North and South are capitalized because they have specific meanings in the US context which is different from non-American, non-capitalized usages, and as a result the demonyms relating to these social groups are likewise capitalized. Ditto for words flowing from the geographical proper nouns "Africa", "Americas", and "Europe", those relating to political or religious persuasions like Baptism (note the need to distinguish from "baptism" and "baptists") and "Democrats" (note again distinction between supporters of "Democratic Party" and "democracy") and those relating to various nationalities and ethnicities like, say: "Red Ruthenians" or "White Huns" (note again not "Huns that are white"). "Republicans" (a meaningless political label no different from "Team Red") has a different meaning to "republicans", and the argument that because an adjective refers to a group of people it should be capitalized is not valid, or else anyone supporting the constitutional situation described by the term "republic" could be described as "Republican", which is obviously not the case. "Colored" (in US contexts) and "Coloured" (in South African contexts, like the Cape Coloureds) were/are defined political-official categories foremost, with meanings specific to their capitalized forms which are different to their non-capitalized forms. (In contexts of historical segregationist societies like these, capitalization of the three segregated groups (viz. whites, coloreds, and coloureds) There really isn't any reason to dignify sweeping generalizations based on skin colour with the status of proper nouns; this is exactly the kind of pigeonholing and emphasis on basically trivial characteristics that one should seek to avoid. There are undoubtedly contexts where capitalizing is appropriate, ("Black hair" is different to "black hair") but I am strongly opposed to enforcing the promotion of what should be an adjectival description into a proper noun label across the project. (Risking whataboutism here but) would the same rationale extend to the forms "Disabled" or "Women"? The capitalization introduces the potential for unwelcome "Othering" and in the text gives undue visual weight to what should be ordinary descriptive words, in my view. GPinkerton (talk) 19:26, 27 November 2020 (UTC)

@
MOS:DOCTCAPS, regardless of topic) rather than just capitalizing the proper names within those phrases. In an ideal world, Black and White would get "retired" just like lots of old ethno-racial labels (Orientals, the Red Man, etc.). But it has not happened yet, and we have to write for the real-world readership. This is a "WP is not for language-change activism" matter both coming and going; neologistic practice is one extreme of it, and hyper-traditionalist no-caps-for-either resistance is the other.
[PS: Sorry if some of this is repetitive of previous posts; I've been cooking and going back and forth from the kitchen, and it would take a really long time to re-read this entire thread. On the up-side, I have discovered that adding a bit of chipotle to gumbo or jambalaya, while not exactly traditional, is marvelous.]
 — SMcCandlish ¢
 😼 
04:29, 28 November 2020 (UTC)

@SMcCandlish: I think your argument is misplaced on two massive points. 1.) English does not capitalise "ethnic" words as you say, and when in former days people were described as red, yellow, and brown upper case was not used (though extraneous capitalization has always been popular on the US. There's no reason to capitalize "oriental". "Latino", like "Negro", is an adaptation of a Spanish word that can be capitalised or not capitalized, as preferred. As you say, "colored" needn't be capitalized either but often was for contextual reasons. "Pacific Islander" only needs to be capitalized to distinguish between people from islands in the Pacific Ocean and other islanders that are pacific. "Native American" must be distinguished from individuals personally native to the United States. 2.) Neither "black" nor "white" are ethnicities or races. There is no real category to which "Black" can universally refer except "heterogeneous non-white peoples with blackish skin". Nothing except skin colour connects the black Australian Aborigines with the black people of Brazil. Similarly, nothing except skin colour connects Afghans with Irishmen, and there is no common ethnicity to which both people could be attached and dignified with a capitalized proper name. Likewise "Asian" is not an ethnicity: there is no common ethnicity to which both Thais and Iraqis and Caucasians belong, and the reason "Asian" is capitalized is because it derives from a proper noun, Asia. Also, I think you may have read the situation in Britain incorrectly; "Afro-Carribean" is sometimes used to distinguish (descendants of) black Africans from other black- or dark-skinned ethic groups from elsewhere in the world, like New Guineans or Melanesians. The news sources adduced as evidence deal with the US perspective, which has peculiar and non-universal attitudes to race and terminology. I'd like to see explicit evidence non-African-American black people referred to as "Black" and non-European-Americans referred to as "White". Calling non-capitalization of both colour adjectives"hyper-traditional", rather than just "common sense", "normal", or "non-political" is jumping the gun by a long shot. All (non-American) media I consume use lowercase letters for adjectives, including adjectives relating to perceived skin colour. Again, the "defined social-political categories" of the US are arbitrary and peculiar to that small fraction of the world's population, and are themselves not based on objective characteristics but socially-defined norms inapplicable outside America. In Europe, the concept of "latino" does not exist, and "Hispanic" is not any kind of racial classification, as it in the US; Spain, to European eyes, is a "white" country, but "Hispanics" in the US are usually considered "non-white". Shoehorning all the world into two categories based on skin colour and dubbing them with proper nouns promoted out of simple adjectives is fundamentally unhelpful in my view, and falls into the old category-errors of the (more) racialized past. GPinkerton (talk) 12:13, 28 November 2020 (UTC)
That claim simply isn't true, though. "The Red man", "the Yellow peril", etc. were frequently capitalized, as was "Oriental" (and still is in the few narrow contexts it retains currency, mostly in its original sense referring to roughly furthest-Eastern Europe though the Middle East to Western Asia [i.e. what used to be the Ottoman Empire]: "Oriental rugs", "Orientalist art", etc.). The fact that they were not always capitalized is irrelevant. (Lots of things WP and other high-quality works capitalize as proper names are mis-lowercased in lower-
Uruk-Hai, Piltdown Man).

You're arguing from a position of "This idea is bad, so we should use style tricks to denigrate that point of view." WP simply does not work that way. I'm not going to continue going in circles on this. I've said my piece, and you have too, and that is sufficient. Especially since a review of your user talk page shows it to be a firehose of warnings and sanctions for disruption, especially in "human group conflict" topics. Anyone with in this much trouble centered on "your people vs. my people" conflicts is not likely to provide very useful input into how WP should write about much matters.
 — SMcCandlish ¢

 😼  17:03, 28 November 2020 (UTC)

It is true, though. Of the eight examples of usage for that sense of "red man, n." in the Oxford English Dictionary, between 1740 and 2003, only two have capitalized "red" and both are 18th century; all the more modern examples are lower case. Similarly, the same dictionary's entry on "yellow peril, n." also suggests lower case was more prevalent between 1895 and 2006, with fourteen examples and only two instances capitalized. Likewise, "oriental, n." (NB headword in lowercase in all instances) and "oriental rug, n." are not generally capitalized, and the editors even note: "Use of oriental in this sense to designate a person is now usually avoided" (NB case). GPinkerton (talk) 22:37, 29 November 2020 (UTC)
Been over this already several times. No one ever argued that any of these terms were always capitalized. The entire point of this discussion is that they are sometimes capitalized, so it is obviously not wrong to do so. Lower-casing has often been done with specific intent, and even more with general and oblivious effect, of pejorative implication. Lower-casing "black" and "white" produces (in proximity to capitalized ethno-racial terms like "Latino", "Asian", etc.) a strong impression for the reader that the groups labeled with the lower-case terms are being denigrated. This problem does not magically go away just because you don't prefer the obvious solution.  — SMcCandlish ¢ 😼  03:16, 8 December 2020 (UTC)

References

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.

Institutions, Commitee and Commission

There's an issue at

MOS:INSTITUTIONS to include when we don't apply Wikipedia style to sourced material. -- JHunterJ (talk
) 14:25, 14 December 2020 (UTC)

 You are invited to join the discussion at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Fraternities and Sororities § Capitalization question. -- Marchjuly (talk) 01:18, 22 December 2020 (UTC)

Slogans

Should "[v]ictory or death" be capitalized in the following sentence on Ali Alexander? I think it should not be, because it's a phrase, not a proper noun. Nightscream, per Special:Diff/1000375775, thinks that it should be. AleatoryPonderings (???) (!!!) 21:14, 14 January 2021 (UTC)

The Guardian named Alexander as among the people active in inciting the crowd outside the Capitol that day, leading chants of "Victory or death".
Doesn't seem to be a proper noun, doesn't even seem to fall into the grey area of an "official slogan" of a company or organization. Looks to me like it lands squarely in the realm of "unnecessary capitalization". Primergrey (talk) 20:25, 15 January 2021 (UTC)
However, if it is being presented as a quoted statement, capping the first word, I think, is an option. Primergrey (talk) 20:28, 15 January 2021 (UTC)
Agreed. Here, it's being presented as a phrase that people were repeating. If it were presented as a quoted personal-statement sentence, it would be different: J. Q. Pubblik, just before before being shot by the Elbonian dictator's guards, shouted "Victory or Death!" And, yeah, people will argue about whether there should be a colon (or comma) before the quote because it's technically a full sentence, under some definitions of "sentence"; I tend not to use one when it's so short and it flows that naturally.  — SMcCandlish ¢ 😼  05:40, 10 February 2021 (UTC)

Capitalisation and lists

Let me preface this by saying this is a somewhat niche case, though it could extend to other similar items in concept.

As far as I can tell, the concept of a fully capitalised list is not covered within this guideline. The item that comes closest to it is the All Caps section, but even within that there is no specification of a case. The reason I bring this up is in reference to

talk
) 03:34, 31 December 2020 (UTC)

Port Adelaide Football Club may format their own list on the walls of their club or on their website in whatever way they prefer, but if it's a list on Wikipedia, it would be formatted in accordance with Wikipedia's Manual of Style. So, almost always, lists would be in sentence case. SchreiberBike | ⌨  04:29, 31 December 2020 (UTC)
No worries. It was worth bringing it up as I couldn't clearly see it falling into the list category alone, nor really anything else, so it was worth investigating what to do in this situation. Thanks!
talk
) 05:06, 31 December 2020 (UTC)
There's no reason that lists or any other "thing" would be exempt from a rule to not use SCREAMING ALL-CAPS, unless there were a line item at
WP:SPLIT to a new article.  — SMcCandlish ¢
 😼  17:02, 3 April 2021 (UTC)

Degree courses

The project page says: "fields of academic or professional study are not capitalized". Does this include the titles of academic subjects, such as undergraduate degree courses and qualifications, e.g. Classics, Human Geography, Economics, Medieval English Literature, etc.? If it is meant to include these, should this be made a little clearer? If I saw a degree qualification, such as any one of these, in lower case, on someone's curriculum vitae, I'd think they were careless. I have always assumed they are proper nouns. Martinevans123 (talk) 10:51, 19 March 2021 (UTC)

The Oxford Style Manual (2003 edn, §4.1.17) covers this as follows:

Capitalize the names of academic subjects only in the context of courses and examinations: "He wanted to study physics, he read Physics, sat the Physics examination, and received a degree in Physics, thereby gaining a physics degree."

In other words, not dissimilar to the republican/Republican distinction already given as an example in our guideline. Per the OSM, one should therefore write "he read Physics at Oxford" [the course], but "he studied physics at Oxford" [the subject]. That may be too subtle a distinction for some. GrindtXX (talk) 16:18, 19 March 2021 (UTC)
No, WP doesn't capitalize in that way. That's a rather strange Oxfordism, and the habit of doing that is why MoS has a section saying not to do it. That is, no one was ever writing "the Physics of billiard balls is complex" or "She attributed their long marriage to good personal Chemisty". These terms were only ever being over-capitalized as academic subjects/research fields. And it's not at all like the republican/Republican distinction. A more apt comparison there would be a "school" or department within a university that has a unique proper name (e.g. "Jones School of Law at the University of Elbonia", directly analogous the proper name "Republican Party of Elbonia"). If it had a generic name like "Law School" or "Department of Physics", just use lower case: "the University of Elbonia law school" or "the law school of the University of Elbonia". The central rule of MOS:CAPS is generally to not capitalize anything that can reasonably be lower-cased. If there's an exception, it'll be enumerated specifically. Here, we have an "un-exception" that is specifically enumerated the other direction: "fields of academic or professional study are not capitalized". A more specific proper title of a course would be capitalized, e.g. "Introduction to Physics II (PHYS-102)", but its uncommon for us to ever write about them. That's more often going to show up in a primary-source citation to an online course syllabus, which should be replaced with a better source. PS: "received a degree in Physics, thereby gaining a physics degree" would be so confusing that the heads of readers and editors alike would asplode.  — SMcCandlish ¢ 😼  12:59, 3 April 2021 (UTC)
Ah yes, asplode. Or else maybe just read on without a single second thought. If I went onto any UK university today and saw "Department of physics" on a door, I'd be quite gobsmacked and would assume it had just been awarded an enormous Wikipedia bursary. I would suggest that a sentence such as "She read Human Geography at St Cuthbert's Society, Durham University" would be seen as 100% normal by most native English readers in the UK. Martinevans123 (talk) 13:15, 3 April 2021 (UTC)
Why would a door ever have a sign reading "Department of physics"? That's not typical signage style, which is mostly Title Case Like This (when it's not all-caps). I think you're maybe trying some kind of reductio ad absurdum or slippery-slope argument. But, no, the sky is not going to fall. And virtually every style choice we're faced with here is – on both (or sometimes more than two) sides – completely normal to various large groups of people. We will never, ever need to have an MoS rule to not write sentences in the form "tHe cOMPANY cLOSED iN 2021.", to not spell "television" as "televizhun", to not use ,,doubled commas,, as quotation marks, or to not give dates in the form "3 2021 April", since these things are not normal to anyone. "It's normal to me" isn't an argument against an MoS rule, but reason there should be one, if some are prone to repetitively argue with other editors about how to write something, until a rule stops those arguments.  — SMcCandlish ¢ 😼  19:41, 3 April 2021 (UTC); copyedited 15:52, 6 April 2021 (UTC)
So you'd know the way in. Thanks. Martinevans123 (talk) 10:33, 4 April 2021 (UTC) p.s. some people still get printed degree certificates that have Physics spelled with a capital P. Unless they work or intend to work in televizhun, of course.
LOL. I meant "Why would it not read 'Department of Physics' like any other signage?" Certificates: Sure, that's title case (heading style). And if it's also done mid-sentence on one, that's just capitalization for emphasis/signification, which is very common in legalese, bureaucratese, business/marketing/PR copy, signage, manuals and documentation, field guides, and various other forms of writing.  — SMcCandlish ¢ 😼  15:52, 6 April 2021 (UTC)
Yes. Very common in universities too. But hey, what do they know. Martinevans123 (talk) 15:54, 6 April 2021 (UTC)
Department names are names and when used as department names should be capitalized, just like any other proper noun phrase. We don't write "United states" merely because the country is composed of states and "state" is also a common English word with the same meaning. Fields of study, used in their common meaning as fields of study, should not be capitalized. Endowed professorships typically have proper names, and when that name includes a field it would be capitalized. So, the following are all correct: "professor of physics in the Department of Physics, University of Oxford" (the linked title is a proper noun phrase, but "professor of physics" are just used as common English words); "Chancellor's Professor of physics at the University of California, Irvine" (at UCI, the "Chancellor's Professor" title is a proper noun, but officially does not include the discipline, and "of physics" is a discipline rather than the department name, which is "Department of Physics & Astronomy"); Cavendish Professor of Physics (the linked title is a proper noun phrase which does include the discipline in the title). The only complication here is that "department of physics" could also be used as a non-name, to refer to a department that specializes in physics but not to refer to it by name (possibly because its actual name is something else like "Henry A. Rowland Department of Physics and Astronomy", the one at Johns Hopkins). —David Eppstein (talk) 19:59, 17 April 2021 (UTC)
"Chancellor's Professor of Physics"-style unique titles (often endowments) were already covered, as capitalized, either here or at
MOS:BIO, but we seem to have lost that. I'm pretty sure that the real-world example it provided was "the Alfred Fitler Moore Professor of Electrical and Systems Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania". There's rarely any need to use such strings except in the person's own bio. And they come up infrequently enough that maybe MoS doesn't need a line-item about it. I mean, it's been who knows how long without anyone noticing the item went missing.  — SMcCandlish ¢
 😼  08:35, 3 May 2021 (UTC)

Irrelevant text in Personal names and Place names sections

It seems that almost none of the text in the Personal names section and none of the text in the Place names section is related to capitalisation. Am I missing something? Should it be moved to the relevant guideline page and/or deleted? —  AjaxSmack  08:18, 18 April 2021 (UTC)

That's probably another artifact of the merger of what was
MOS:TITLES, etc. You've probably just identified more of that mis-placed MOS:PN stuff. I'll look over it soon, unless someone else wants to beat me to it (though I've been doing almost all the merge, consolidation, and cross-referencing work on MoS stuff for a long time now, since it's not sexy enough to attract anyone else's labor, and its easy to break things if you don't know all the material in all the affected pages very well).  — SMcCandlish ¢
 😼  08:28, 3 May 2021 (UTC)
I've put merge tags on them, to Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Biography, and Wikipedia:Manual of Style#Geographical items, respectively.  — SMcCandlish ¢ 😼  09:02, 3 May 2021 (UTC)
And
WT:MOSBIO have been notified of this discussion.  — SMcCandlish ¢
 😼  09:10, 3 May 2021 (UTC)

Hi all, I 'd like to request your assistance and advice at

Pre-socratic philosophy. Which version of the word "presocratic" should we be using in the article. Almost all RS are using the word "Presocratic". I feel it is common sense we follow their lead. Or should we follow MOS guidance which in that case would be "pre-Socratic" or "presocratic"? Please have a look at the talk page. Pinging @Teishin:, who pointed to this talk page when discussing the issue at Talk Page. Cinadon36
13:29, 17 May 2021 (UTC)

This would appear to belong in the discussion above on this page about other, similar problems associated with capitalizing terms in Greek philosophy. [58]. Teishin (talk) 13:36, 17 May 2021 (UTC)
I would prefer to discuss this separately, as it will be easier to reach a consensus because it is a less complicated issue and somewhat different. Cinadon36 13:45, 17 May 2021 (UTC)
I don't see the issues here to be any different from those with, for example, Neopythagoreanism or Neoplatonism or Middle Platonism. Teishin (talk) 14:05, 17 May 2021 (UTC)
There is a hyphen involved but most importantly, I am not here to solve this issue. I feel you are dragging me into a question you asked some months ago and is still pending. The discussion above is about fixing the guideline, I am only interested in finding a solution for the article, since it is awaiting a GA evaluation.Cinadon36 14:16, 17 May 2021 (UTC)
The issue isn't about the hypen. You're bringing up the same issue in pre-Socratic philosophy that I brought up above. According to MOS, we must use "presocratic" or "pre-Socratic" despite the fact that the literature on the subject almost entirely uses "Presocratic" or "Pre-Socratic". The "solution" for the article at this point is
MOS:DOCTCAPS. Teishin (talk
) 16:56, 17 May 2021 (UTC)
No, when the MOS tells us to ignore what RS are doing, we ) 01:22, 20 May 2021 (UTC)
Srnec regarding this issue, reliable sources are inconsistent. Various publishers have a variety of style guides. Teishin (talk) 02:42, 20 May 2021 (UTC)
They are not inconsistent about capitalizing Presocratic. The standard atop the page is "consistently capitalized in a substantial majority of independent, reliable sources." That's what we have here. Srnec (talk) 03:57, 20 May 2021 (UTC)

I don't understand the problem. The MOS as quoted above includes "unless the name derives from a proper name". Socrates is a proper name, and both pre-Socratic and Presocratic are very common in sources compared to Pre-Socratic and presocratic. Sources and the MOS agree that a capital letter is needed. Pick one. Dicklyon (talk) 04:56, 20 May 2021 (UTC)

Overhauling
MOS:CAPS#Peoples and their languages

When we (well, mostly I) merged away

WP:Manual of Style/Proper names after a 2018 proposal to do so, the content ended up in MOS:CAPS, MOS:TM, MOS:BIO, MOS:TITLES, and the main MoS page. That was mostly done pretty well, except we ended up with WP:Manual of Style/Capital letters#Peoples and their languages
containing nothing but a single sentence (on an obscure matter), nothing about capitalization, and no advice that people are actually likely to ever be looking for. I'm pretty sure I noticed this at the time and meant to do something about it, but then other stuff intervened.

I've taken a stab at codifying actual consensus-in-practice, as best I can summarize it, in the following:

Peoples and their languages

Terms for peoples and cultures, languages and dialects, nationalities, ethnic and religious groups, and the like are capitalized, including in adjectival forms (

does not capitalize
the e of español. If in doubt, check how multiple high-quality reliable sources in English treat the name or phrase.

Combining forms are also generally capitalized where the proper name occurs: (

Tatarophobia, etc.), else the lower-casing of Semitic may appear pointed and insulting. Similarly, for consistency within the article, prefer un-American and pan-American in an article that also uses anti-American, pan-African, and similar compounds. (See also WP:Manual of Style § US and U.S.
for consistency between country abbreviations.)

Where a common name in English encompasses both a people and their language, that term is preferred, as in

Kiswahili
.

For eponyms more broadly, see WP:Manual of Style § Eponyms.

Some of this could be shunted into footnotes, though I don't think it's overly long. I don't think I've missed anything important here (other than see the thread immediately above this one), nor said anything that is just a random opinion and not reflected in actual practice across our articles, and also sometimes subject to various previous discussions, e.g. I was recently informed that "anti-Semitism" vs. "antisemitism" has been the subject of repeated RfCs, RMs, etc., and without a consensus to demand/reject either spelling. Finally, I've also tried to cross-reference the other material that most closely relates to this, including

MOS:CONFUSED. The thread above (#Discussion about capitalisation of Black (people)) and the request to summarize the recent RfC in this MOS:CAPS section is what inspired this fix-it work, since the section as it stood was so faulty that adding such an RfC summary in there might seem a confusing non sequitur.
 — SMcCandlish ¢
 😼  06:17, 5 February 2021 (UTC)

On first reading I like it. Tony (talk) 04:18, 13 February 2021 (UTC)
SMcCandlish, that kind of whisky doesn't have an "e". GPinkerton (talk) 16:02, 13 February 2021 (UTC)
Seriously! I'm surprised BarrelProof hasn't jumped on that! But what about Scotch-like whisky made in Japan, or India? Is the e optional? No, looks like the e is only in the US. So maybe it's just an Engvar thing, not a whisky type thing? Dicklyon (talk) 16:49, 13 February 2021 (UTC)
Fixed! I'd forgotten that (I quit drinking years ago, so my whisk[e]y and beer-related mental storehouse of terminological trivia is dissolving, like ice in Scotch.  — SMcCandlish ¢ 😼  17:53, 13 February 2021 (UTC)
Dicklyon, WhiskVar: Irish and US has an e; Scotch never. Other countries usually follow the style their emulating: Japanese Scotch no e. GPinkerton (talk) 18:16, 13 February 2021 (UTC)
Ah, I should have checked Irish! Dicklyon (talk) 07:29, 14 February 2021 (UTC)
"ligurgical Latin"? Shouldn't that be "liturgical Latin"? Or is this a specialized term I'm not familiar with? (Honest question, I could see it existing.)--Khajidha (talk) 12:23, 16 February 2021 (UTC)
Fixed. Ligurgical Latin is what you speak after too much whisk[e]y.  — SMcCandlish ¢ 😼  13:25, 28 February 2021 (UTC)
"Going twice ...." Are there any concerns about this wording or its placement? I would like to proceed with this, since it's very undesirable to have a section in a guideline purporting to be relevant and to provide guidance but failing to do either.  — SMcCandlish ¢ 😼  08:22, 18 March 2021 (UTC)
The sentence "Terms for peoples and cultures, languages and dialects, nationalities, ethnic and religious groups, and the like are capitalized" seems to conflict with the decision that "Black" and "White" are not necessarily capitalized, as these are "terms for peoples." I would like to see how the language on "color labels" will be incorporated into this section. Qzekrom (she/her • talk) 17:06, 28 March 2021 (UTC)
@Qzekrom: That's covered in #Wording proposal on ethnic/racial terms, in light of the recent RfC, above. I'll have to pore over that again to see it there were objections, revision suggestions, etc., but I think what I drafted is more or less what would get added, though maybe I can think of ways to compress it. Keep in mind that the impetus to revise that section of MoS entirely (as discussed in this talk-page section) was that the material discussed in that prior talk page section had no clear place to "live"; it's what made us notice that this guideline section is basically a broken remnant of an old merge and needs overhauling. So, there is certainly no intent to use this talk section to end-run around the section above; quite the opposite.  — SMcCandlish ¢ 😼  12:18, 3 April 2021 (UTC)
Well, I must be getting senile. I actually already implemented this passage, as
MOS:PEOPLANG, back on 5 February. So, all that remains is putting in the material from above, which has no objections other than one person basically wished the RfC had concluded with a "never capitalize" result, which it did not.  — SMcCandlish ¢
 😼  18:16, 3 April 2021 (UTC)
Ok, it is merged in now.  — SMcCandlish ¢ 😼  19:17, 3 April 2021 (UTC)
Great! Qzekrom (she/her • talk) 19:40, 3 April 2021 (UTC)
  • So what is left? Otr500 (talk) 16:52, 24 May 2021 (UTC)