Forum:Capitalisation to proper English

Forums: Index > Rin's Travel Agency > Archive > Capitalisation to proper English

		00:34, November 20, 2015 (UTC) Technobliterator Talk
		Yes, yes, old topic...but I feel it needed to be brought up. On the wiki, we currently use Title Case when naming articles and subheaders, instead of Sentence case. This has been known as the "OCD rule", because essentially there is no reason to do it. This is something I have wanted to change since joining, it's unprofessional, not encyclopedic and incorrect. Furthermore, it makes linking to pages more difficult than it should be, and often leads to confusion as to when to capitalise in the article and when not to. Let's make one thing clear. There is no reason to continue this other than status quo stonewalling. Really, the Title Case rule doesn't serve any encyclopedic purpose at all. Now, if you want to say "oh, but so many pages use title case already, this would be too much work!", then I would agree with you...several years ago before we had bots. Yes, it's incredibly easy to get the bot to move pages to their properly categorized names and to give the bot a list of changes it should make for links. For the most part, this will be the last letter of the "list of" pages and things like "(Ability)" to "(ability)". I'm bringing this up to propose changing the wiki's capitalisation to what it should, in proper English, be, instead of what it ended up with because not many people cared. If this goes ahead, I will program the bot to do both the moving and the page cleaning.

As a bonus note, I don't remember all the details, but we switched to using Title Case not after a discussion. Ergo, it was never consensus. It is now written in policy though, because the policy was only written after it just became what we do. Title Case in categories was consensus though, or rather we needed a consistency, and one user said they preferred it and no one was against (or shared an opinion).

I support sentence case in article titles, article headers, and category names. JBed (talk) 01:07, November 20, 2015 (UTC)

Sentence case would be better in my opinion, but it's not "wrong" to have it the way we have it, just uncommon.Keltainentoukokuu (talk) 09:31, November 20, 2015 (UTC)

I think that sentence case might be a better choice too. Sometimes it drives me nuts that I need to type in a sentence something like "[[Perfectly Capitalized Article Name|perfectly capitalized article name]]" an not just using all lowercase because redirects and stuff. With the bot, you should also remember about all-lowercase redirects I think; I'm not sure how it's handled between Monobook and Oasis skins.—Kaimi (Talk • FA Voting) 11:43, November 20, 2015 (UTC)

Oh, the bot will just completely move the pages over redirects and delete them. We won't need upper case redirects to replace them, since no one will really search the upper case names in the input.

Since it sounds like everyone agrees, I can probably prepare the script soon. I didn't think about categories at all, and I'm not sure how to move more than one at once, but in the worst case scenario we can leave them as is for later.-- Technobliterator ^T_C 11:55, November 20, 2015 (UTC)

Agree with above comments that sentence case, while not necessarily wrong, is preferable to title case. Techno's asked me to help on Thanksgiving week (that's 22nd - 27th November for all you freedom-haters) with bot work, so hopefully we can get this done in a few days. Cat (meow ∙ hunt) 21:42, November 20, 2015 (UTC)

With the way the monobook (Go) search system works, without us needing to create a redirect, searching for a title written in Sentence case with Title Case, or written in Title Case with Sentence case will take you to the page. Basically it doesn't matter what CASE the first letter of each word is when Go searching.

Oasis doesn't have Go search so it doesn't matter. And its search suggest doesn't take into account CASE at all. JBed (talk) 22:23, November 20, 2015 (UTC)

Question! Will we also be moving Help and Projectspace articles to names with Sentence case spelling/writing?—Kaimi (999,999 CP/5 TP) ∙ 23:13, November 22, 2015 (UTC)

Good question, Kaimi, I'm not sure. I personally think giving project pages title case makes sense, since they're supposed to be official things and a title case is appropriate. Help pages probably can be renamed though. I didn't really have those in mind.

Okay, as for how we're doing this. We're going to be going through each category (using the bot to generate lists) to find them. I'd really like to be able to use a regex to a) find any page not including certain text (ie any page not including "Command)" in it) and b) automatically lowercase some pages (like Glitches, Sidequests and Recurring Elements which all need renaming). Then I'd just need a way to make the edited text appear below original titles for the bot to work properly. The replace bot will have an easier job, we'll have it run on every page indexed with a category (ie everything in Category:Final Fantasy Wiki), then probably on every talk page and article talk page, and it'll just make the generic changes like "Ability)" to "ability)" while also making changes for glitch etc pages.

It's basically inevitable that the bot will miss a few, and because of redirects and stuff it'll be hard for most users to move, so please add {{Decapitalise}} if you can't move a page and need an admin to. Any questions?-- Technobliterator ^T_C 23:22, November 22, 2015 (UTC)

You're saying it as if mods can happen upon "articles moved limit". Is that right or just not a good choice of words? Aside of that nothing else comes to mind.—Kaimi (999,999 CP/5 TP) ∙ 23:36, November 22, 2015 (UTC)

I thought mods couldn't move pages over redirects. If they can, I can edit that to justsay mods can do that as well.-- Technobliterator ^T_C 23:46, November 22, 2015 (UTC)

To-do list for this project is here. Cat (meow ∙ hunt) 05:31, November 23, 2015 (UTC)

I don't know exactly what powers mods have. Also, I'm looking at that file and I'm a bit confused: we need to move content of those categories, yes? It's just written a bit too generally IMO. Also could we update Project:Naming Policy and Help:Tags and Disambiguation Pages pages and kinda start to enforce the rules with newly created articles? I'd like to have this officially stated if we're going to have this.—Kaimi (Talk • FA Voting) 19:20, November 23, 2015 (UTC)