Questions and requests posted here may not be answered promptly. Odds are, any query about capital letters and Wikipedia will be more quickly addressed at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Capital letters, even if it's specifically about article titles.
Add new items at top of list; move to Concluded when decided, and summarize the conclusion. Comment at them if interested. Please keep this section at the top of the page.
Talk:Tri-State tornado outbreak#Requested move 18 December 2024 – Was this a "Tri-State tornado outbreak" or a "tri-state tornado outbreak"? Result: Year added ("1925 Tri-State tornado outbreak"), but no explicit conclusion was expressed about capitalization (an initial move to lowercase was changed by the closer to uppercase the next day), then a move review was opened
Talk:Bolognese School#Requested move 26 July 2024 (14 articles) – Lowercase school for "schools" of artistic styles of painting that are not the names of actual institutions? Result: Lowercase except two that were found frequently uppercased in sources
Talk:War of 1812/Archive_29#Capitalisation of "house" and "senate" – as stand-alone terms in prose. Result: Not a formally closed discussion. In summary, shortened forms of names for institutions are not capitalized unless they are "a shorter but still specific form", not just a single generic word. The material at MOS:INSTITUTIONS probably could be clarified on the question, as this isn't the first time the matter has come up.
Talk:Hurricane Alley#Requested move 11 July 2024 – Call this the "Main Development Region" or "Main development region"? Result: "Main Development Region" without prejudice against considering "Main development region"; new RM opened.
Talk:Popverse#Redirect templates – Should the "avoided double redirect" tag to applied on a correctly capitalized redirect when there's a similar but miscapitalized redirect? Or should only the miscapitalized one be so tagged? Result – Removed tag from correctly capitalized Popverse as inappropriate, and left it on PopVerse which is miscapitalized.
Talk:IMP.#Requested move 9 June 2024 – All-caps for this shortened form of "Impactors"? Result: All-caps retained since sources seem to do that.
Talk:Pied-Noir#Lowercase – Lowercase "Pied-Noir" (or use "Pied-noir" or "Pieds-Noirs" or "Pieds-noirs" or "pieds-noirs")? Result: Lowercase "noirs", leaning lowercase for "pieds" as well.
Talk:Toy boy#Requested move 17 December 2023 – Should lowercase indicate a boy that is a toy rather than the title of some published works? Result: Yes; disambiguation moved to uppercase.
WT:WikiProject Freemasonry#Capitalization – Where do we draw the line of capitalization of offices and such in Freemasonry? Result: Some say just follow MOS:OFFICE, others want to follow Freemasonry's conventions. No clear consensus.
Talk:NTV Plus#Requested move 15 September 2023 – Is all-caps an appropriate distinction between Russian and Nepali TV channels? Result: No; use ordinary title case for proper name, not all-caps.
Talk:Sangaku#Capitalization: is the article title just an ordinary Japanese word borrowed into English, or a proper noun? (note – while the discussion was not formally closed, all instances are now in lowercase
Talk:Welsh Revolt#Requested move 30 July 2023 – Initially Welsh Revolt → Glyndŵr Rebellion but subsequently a question of capitalising the second word in any choice. Result: Lowercase "rebellion".
Talk:In Search of...#Requested move 10 October 2022 – Should the "of..." become "Of..." because it is the last word of the title? (a two-article RM) Result: Retain lowercase since truncation of a longer title is implied.
Talk:Lost Decades#Requested move 7 July 2022 – Lowercase "Decades", among other issues? Result: Not moved. The closer commented about primary topic status but did not comment about capitalization.
User talk:Snickers2686#MOS:JOBTITLES – "until [JOBTITLES is] applied consistently, which it isn't in this set of articles, then to me, it doesn't apply at all". – judges generally lowercased
Talk:National Historic Landmark#Requested move 18 January 2022 – Multimove to lowercase for "National Historic [Capitalized singular]", "National [Capitalized plural]", and "List of Historic [Capitalized plural]"? Result: Withdrawn after near-unanimous opposition to the central principle based on the linguistic concept of a proper name, noting consistent capitalization in sources.
Talk:g-force#Requested move 7 January 2022 – "g-force" or "G-force"? Result: RM procedurally closed (made no difference) and usage in article prose already changed to "g-force".
2021
RMs on capitalization of "Attorneys" and "Ambassadors" (or rephrasing to avoid the plural formal title): – all downcased
WT:AT#RFC on dash-separated titles for sports events 2 January 2022 – Capping of "Men's Singles" and "women's doubles"? Result: No consensus to ban dashes, no consensus on capitalization; consensus that capitalization should be worked out at WikiProject Tennis.
This is more of a WT:MOSCAPS question, since this isn't about article titles in particular. The answer for this is the same as for any other capitalization question: Wikipedia relies on sources to determine what is conventionally capitalized; only words and phrases that are consistently capitalized in a substantial majority of independent, reliable sources are capitalized in Wikipedia. (From lead of MOS:CAPS.) So, if these kinds of features are not capitalized across the vast majority of all reliable source material, they shouldn't be capitalized on Wikipedia. N-grams may not always be much help, since some of these terms don't appear in enough books to even rate on the graph [1][2]. — SMcCandlish☏¢ 😼 02:21, 21 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I would generally agree with SMcCandlish and the broad guidance at MOS:CAPS. Such noun phrases (titles) are of the format proper noun that should be capitalised, followed by a descriptor (eg rift). There is a common misperception that if the first part of the noun phrase is capitalised, then all parts of the phrase should be capitalised. True proper nouns are not descriptive (eg a volcanic complex at a certain place is a descriptive name, with the place midifying the descriptor). When we are dealing with a descriptive term in a noun phrase, the presumption should be that it is not capitalised unless the evidence of usage is telling us otherwise. If there isn't evidence of vast usage of a term then one cannot assert capitalisation in a vast majority of sources. This just comes down to whether we have a statistically significant sample set to reach a conclusion on whether something should be capitalised. Cinderella157 (talk) 02:05, 14 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
OP observes, "Some sources fully capitalize the names of geologic features while others do not". Per the basic criterion of MOS:CAPS ("only words and phrases that are consistently capitalized in a substantial majority of independent, reliable sources are capitalized in Wikipedia"), where that observation is true, we use lowercase. Dicklyon (talk) 03:25, 23 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I do see a lot of inconsistency in this space. We've had recent multi-RM discussions with consensus to lowercase "plate" and "fracture zone", and we have one open now about "terrane". Probably we'll do more, but I expect some of the Basins, Rifts, Troughs, Ridges, Faults, Grabens, Cratons, and such are actually proper names, consistently capped in sources. Not all are, though, especially those with "system" or "zone" appended, as here or here. Dicklyon (talk) 05:19, 14 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Seems to be, at least in this sense (of the extant goverment that officially calls itself the Australian Government, of the nation-state of Australia). There has been other colonial-onward governance in Australia (which was originally called New South Wales), i.e. "Australian government" as a mass noun or "Austrlian governments" as a plural count noun, for which the Australian Government might not be the proper name. E.g., the Australian Constitution (1900) would seem to have it in long form as the Executive Government of the Commonwealth of Australia, usually shortened in one phrasing or another, with capitalization of those forms inconsistent. Anyway, "the Foo Government" seems marginally the most common construction (in English) for these things, e.g. the United States Government (abbreviated U.S. Goverment, US Government, or in some inside the Beltway contexts as USG), but quite often it's the other order, e.g. Government of Canada ("Canadian government" seems to be a journalistic shorthand, not used officially, and usually without "G"); and the Government of Ireland since 1920 ("Irish government" also frequently occurs, but usually without "G", and does not appear to be an official name, though I ran into a little use of it seemingly informally in some departmental materials). The UK is weird; the Government of the United Kingdom has quite a bit of currency and seems to be usually treated as if a proper name, but the real/official proper name is technically His [formerly Her] Majesty's Government, and "the UK government" seems to usually be lower-cased as a descriptive appellation (even at governmental sites). UK and some other parliamentary countries are a bit odd also in that they distinguish between "Parliament" and "the Government", despite the government being run by the Prime Minister who is of the parliament (the legislative body) and not a non-parliamentary official (as in most presidential-type systems); plus the term "government" gets used in a count-noun, common-noun way differently, to mean specific governments put together by specific PMs ("Rishi Sunak's government" or "the government of Riski Sunak"). In American usage, Congress is part of the US government (the US system of governance), but not part of the capital-G US Government (the executive branch), so I guess it's not that dissimilar from the distinction the UK Parliament is drawing, despite there being much less separation of powers in the UK and most other parliamentary systems. Gets complicated in other ways in the UK; e.g. the overall parliament in Great Britain now calls itself the UK Parliament, but was historically more often the Parliament of the United Kingdom (often informally the British Parliament, which seemed more often to be capitalized than to get a "p", though it seems to be slipping into disuse now, is usually found in non-UK media, and usually with "p"). Meanwhile the devolved one in Scotland is officially the Scottish Parliament not "the Scotland Parliament" or "the Parliament of Scotland"; same with the Scottish Government (not "the Government of Scotland", etc.). Various states (often of a "revolutionary" character) often have more complicated names for their governments, like Supreme Political Council, etc. — SMcCandlish☏¢ 😼 15:20, 10 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I recently edited the following sentence in the guideline intro "For multiword page titles, one should leave the second and subsequent words in lowercase unless the title phrase is a proper name that would always occur capitalized, even mid-sentence" to read "...that would consistently occur capitalized..." My edit was reverted.
I assumed that the intent of the statement was to address the fact that a number of sources may capitalize terms in the titles of articles, but not in the running text, and that "always" meant always within a single source.
However, in a recent move discussion, another user interpreted this statement to mean always in every source.
The idea that a term is literally always capitalized in every source is untenable and adherence to such a rule would require major changes at Wikipedia. For example, "Second World War" and "American Civil War" are not invariably capitalized. The Economist, a respected major publication, doesn't capitalize either per its Style Guide. (p. 176 of the 2018 edition; e.g. here,here and here), while Wikipedia does.
And if "always" is not to be taken literally, then it probably doesn't belong in a guideline.
It is a truism that proper names|nouns are always capitalised. The spirit and intent of the truism does not mean that we will never find an instance where this is not the case but it will be inconsequential and probably attributable to a typographical error. Statistically, these would be outliers. Given the spirit and intent of always as used here, it is not intended to be taken literally and imply absolute uniformity but it does set a very high bar since the truism is followed with near universal consistency. Not everything that is written should be taken absolutely literally. To argue same is in essence reductio ad absurdum. I note that always has existed in this guidance since its inception. The ngrams for Second World War (here) does now show near universal capitalisation, even if that was not always the case. That is because it is arguably not a true proper name but a descriptive name capitalised for emphasis or significance. We see the same for American Civil Warhere. As to the assumption of intent proposed by AjaxSmack, I see nothing in the overall guidance that would support such a reading between the lines. Cinderella157 (talk) 04:11, 19 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]
"Always" here means "always, by competent writers, in actually reliable sources independent of the subject". There are many, many things that some professional writers capitalize and others do not, and about 95% of tedious "style warfare" on Wikipedia is about these things - stuff that people like to capitalize if they are fans of it, if it pertains to their business, if they think it's important/influential/famous, if they think doing so shows deference/respect (and they feel like offering it), or simply because they are terrible writers who think that capital letters exist for providing a form of emphasis, a habit found in advertising and in some bureaucratese. These things are objectively not proper names, because they are not found consistently capitalized across virtually all of the reliable source material. Instead, they are affected by partial capitalization whorls of subjective preference that reflect a mixture of non-neutral promotionalism, jargon-mongering (specialist-to-specialist writing habits), and simply poor writing skills.
We should not make any changes that encourage more "Give me capitalization of my pet subject or give me death!" behavior, from any quarter. The problem with moving from "always" to "consistently" in this guideline (about titles, which are the only "style" matter the community has seen fit to make a matter of policy instead of just guidelines) is that there is no clear definition of "consistently" in this context, and we already have the problem that use of this term in MOS:CAPS has resulted in about two decades of protracted battlegrounding to force WP to capitalize various things that certain editors badly want capitalized for their own personal (and sometimes third-party offsite interest) reasons. The last thing we need to happen is for WP:NCCAPS to become similarly wishwashy and subject to never-ending dispute about just how much capitalization counts as "consistently". In actual practice, the standard amounts to about a 90%+ rate, going by historical patterns of results at well-attended RMs and other debates about such matters. But the pressure from the capitals fans is never relaxed even for a moment, aiming to reduce this to more like 80%, or 65%, or 50.00001%. This is long-term problematic, because the slow-movewar gameplayers who want to over-capitalize things have a years-long obsession with getting what they want, while the vast majority of editors don't really care all that much one way or other and lose patience with it, resulting in something of a war of attrition. It's usual "civil PoV-pushing" problem that a party damned well determined to get what they want, and carefully skirting behavioral rule limits, can push and push and push for years until they finally exhaust the opposition, who all have more important things on their minds. — SMcCandlish☏¢ 😼 19:13, 19 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]
If "'always' here means 'always, by competent writers, in actually reliable sources independent of the subject'", then how do you feel about the American Civil War et al? Should that article be moved, is the Economist incompetent or is there a lack of virtue in this case in your "across virtually all of the reliable source material"? I agree that we "should not make any changes that encourage more 'Give me capitalization of my pet subject or give me death!' behavior", but a guideline should be a realistic, not pointily polemical. — AjaxSmack00:21, 23 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]
How I personally "feel" about a particular subject doesn't matter much. The ngram evidence suggests that "American Civil War" is super-mega-overwhelmingly capitalized in source material [3] (even when American sources are excluded [4]). Lower-casing sources on this one are close to non-existent. So, this is consistently capitalized in reliable sources, to a level that amounts to "always" if one doesn't want to be an extreme literalist in a WP:LAWYER vein. If The Econonomist ends up being an ultra-rare hold out that writes "American civil war", who cares? WP is not written to The Economist Style Guide (and not much else is beyond The Economist and its side publications), nor does that publisher follow our style guide. The existence of conflicting styles is why we have style guidelines in the first place, so the fact that another style conflict can be found "in the wild" doesn't have any implications for our style guidelines. The existence of a style guide that might even be more downcasing than WP's own doesn't mean WP should adopt its preferences or even that internal supporters of WP having a general downcasing approach by default will necessarily agree with an "ultra-downcasing" one found externally. I may be personally "pointed" in my criticism of style-related battlegrounding behavior, but this (and other guidelines) are not worded in that way, so there's not a tone problem to address here. To the extent that the simple wording in this guideline might inspire an attempt at tedious wikilawyering by someone to rule out capitalization if one single instance of lowercasing is ever found offsite (a viewpoint the community would not accept, but which it couldn't prevent being advanced by someone), this could possibly be dissuaded by replacing "always" with what I used above: "always, by competent writers, in actually reliable sources independent of the subject". PS: virtual in the sense of virtuality doesn't have anything to do with possession or lack of virtues in the moral sense. Use of virtual as a synonym of virtuous is obsolete, probably since at least the 19th century. But you likely already know that and were joking; it's hard to tell in a text-only medium. PPS: The Economist Style Guide was apparently confusingly renamed for its 12th ed. in 2023 [5]. — SMcCandlish☏¢ 😼 10:04, 23 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]
TL;DR: The threshold for capitalization or lack thereof should be the same as the threshold for a common name.
WP:AT says: Generally, article titles are based on what the subject is called in reliable sources. There is less than zero reason why the one exception to that should be the most trivial of matters: capitalization. The standard for American Revolution vs. American revolution should be the same as that of, say, Dog vs. Canis lupus familiaris. In the latter case, the majority of sources use Dog, thus that is the common name. In the former case, the majority of sources use American Revolution, thus that is the common name. There is nothing that makes capitalization somehow magically different from every other titling scenario.
If the title of an article in sources is 75% uppercase and 25% lowercase, then NCCAPS recommends we lowercase it. That's just plain wrong. If article titles on based on what the subject is called in reliable sources, then why should we contradict that rule for a small subclass of naming disputes? Going by sources and uppercasing the title violates no core content policies and reinforces the in-a-nutshell core of the titling policy. It's nonsense that we should ignore policy and a supermajority of sources to uphold this dubious guideline.
Thus we should follow the sources, as we always have. The threshold for capitalization should not be 100%, nor 95%, nor 90%. It should be 50% + 1 (with a ±5 to account for the extreme influence Wikipedia has on sources' titling). @Cinderella157, SMcCandlish, and AjaxSmack: What say you? Regards, 🐔ChicdatBawk to me!22:36, 25 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
"The threshold for capitalization or lack thereof should be the same as the threshold for a common name." You're welcome to that opinion, but it is not the consensus, which has been stable for around two decades. You can rant all you want about something being "wrong", and all that tells us that is that you have prescriptivist viewpoint that is incompatible with neutrally editing encyclopedia style-guideline material. We have a very high standard (amounts to about a 90%+ capitalization rate) for the specific reason that WP avoids all capitalization and other unnecessary text stylization of all kinds in all cases, and only permits it when the RS usage overwhelmingly prefers the stylization in a particular instance. Your "50.1%" idea is utterly incompatible with that goal and practice. And is a perennial bad idea.
The actual result of trying to implement that would a never-ending shitstorm of "style warfare", with every editor who had nothing better to do desperately trying to manipulate source stats to get across the 50.1% or 49.9% "magic line" they wanted, and for every case it could be reopened again and again and again the moment any new sources appeared. This is all avoided by a simple rule: if the sources demonstrate that the capitalization is optional, then we do not use it. Ultimately, there is no connection of any kind between COMMONNAME and NCCAPS/MOS:CAPS/MOS:TM. Your idea of trying to equate them is like saying "since I have to take 500 mg of drug A for problem A, that means I must also take 500 mg of drug B for problem B", which is apt to kill you. — SMcCandlish☏¢ 😼 07:23, 26 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I have a couple of thoughts on recent comments.
Having "always" in a guideline borders on bizarre. "Always here means "always, by competent writers, in actually reliable sources" is not compatible with The Economist not capitalizing "American Civil War". The Economist is reliable with at least some competent writers and is a major, influential source. If "in actual practice, the standard amounts to about a 90%+ rate", then that's what the guideline should read.
"We should not make any changes that encourage more 'give me capitalization of my pet subject'..." I agree, but that already happens even with the current guideline.
"There is less than zero reason why the one exception to that should be the most trivial of matters: capitalization." Maybe. But how is "what the subject is called in reliable sources" to be expressed in this guideline?
A practical expression of 50% + 1 is "about 60%" or "a majority"; But I agree with User:SMcCandlish who (I think) worries that a simple numerical threshold will invite some major editor wars (e.g. a majority of which sources? specialist? generalist?).
Sentiments like "the last thing we need to happen is for WP:NCCAPS to become similarly wishwashy and subject to never-ending dispute" seems to invite titles that do not reflect the majority of sources just to avoid editor debate. The way to avoid debating is simply to avoid debates.
I agree with User:Chicdat that NCCAPS should not depart from other similar guidelines to this degree, especially if it is primarily for editor convenience (WP:RF). I'm not too pessimistic to think a quality guideline can be crafted that actually reflects what Wikipedia's reality looks like (i.e. not "always") Wikipedia can have both its own robust style guide and hew more closely to the preponderance reliable sources.
