UniWiki:Manual of Style/Capital letters

This page is a part of the UniWiki's Manual of Style. It is a general guideline intended to harmonize article style across the UniWiki, though it is best treated with common sense, and exceptions may apply. Any substantive edit to this page should be approved by the Wiki Manager. When in doubt, discuss first on the talk page.

The UniWiki avoids unnecessary capitalization. However, EVE (and by extension, the UniWiki) is unique in that most ships, modules, and other items in the game are referred to in the title case; that is, each word is capitalized. The UniWiki relies on in-game information to determine what is a proper name; words and phrases that are consistently capitalized in-game are treated as proper names and capitalized on the UniWiki.

There are exceptions for specific cases discussed below.

Do not use for emphasis

See also: UniWiki:Manual of Style/Text formatting

Initial capitals or all capitals should not be used for emphasis. If wording alone cannot provide the required emphasis, italics, or, preferably, the <em></em> HTML tags, should be used:

Not recommended: It is not only a LITTLE learning that is dangerous.

Not recommended: It is not only a Little learning that is dangerous.

Not recommended: It is not only a little learning that is dangerous.

Recommended: It is not only a little learning that is dangerous.

Headings, headers, and captions

Main article: UniWiki:Manual of Style#Section headings

Use sentence case, not title case, capitalization in most section headings. Capitalize the first letter of the first word, but leave the rest lower case except for proper names and other items that would ordinarily be capitalized in running text.

Not recommended: Economic and Demographic Shifts After World War II

Recommended: Economic and demographic shifts after World War II

The same applies to the titles of articles, table headers and captions, the headers of infoboxes and navigation templates, and image captions and alt text. (For list items, see next section.)

It is easier for articles to be merged or split if headings resemble titles.

Initial letters in sentences and list items

The initial letter in a sentence is capitalized. This does not apply if it begins with a letter which is always left uncapitalized (as in "eBay"; see § Items that require initial lower case below), although it is usually preferable to recast the sentence.

When a sentence contains non-final punctuation such as a dash or semicolon, there is no reason to capitalize the following letter, even if it begins a grammatically separate sentence: Cheese is a dairy product; bacon is not. The same usually applies after colons, although sometimes the word following a colon is capitalized, if that word effectively begins a new grammatical sentence, and especially if the colon serves to introduce more than one sentence.

In a list, if each item of the list is a complete sentence, then it should be capitalized like any other sentence. If the list items are sentence fragments, then capitalization should be consistent – sentence case should be applied to either all or none of the items. See UniWiki:Manual of Style § Bulleted and numbered lists.

After hyphenation

In article text, do not use a capital letter after a hyphen except for a proper name: Graeco-Roman and Mediterranean-style, but not Ghandi-Like. Letters used as designations are treated as names for this purpose: a size-A drill bit. (For cases involving titles, see § Titles of people, and § Composition titles.)

Proper names

Proper names of specific places, persons, terms, etc. are capitalized in accordance with standard usage: Winston Churchill, John de Balliol, Wales, Tel Aviv, Three Great Gardens of Japan, etc.

Most adjectives derived from proper names should be capitalized, e.g. the English people, the Kantian imperative, with occasional established exceptions such as teddy bear.

Some terms contain personal names used in a way that does not refer to any specific individual; these are not proper names, and are lower-cased: jack in the pulpit, round-robin.

Capitalization of "The"

Do not ordinarily capitalize the definite article after the first word of a sentence; however some idiomatic expressions, including the titles of artistic works, should be quoted exactly according to common usage. Use the same capitalization as the title of the article.

Incorrect	(generic):	an article about The United Kingdom (a redirect)
Correct	(generic):	an article about the United Kingdom
Incorrect	(title):	J. R. R. Tolkien wrote the Lord of the Rings. (a redirect)
Correct	(title):	J. R. R. Tolkien wrote The Lord of the Rings.
Incorrect	(title):	Homer wrote The Odyssey. (a redirect)
Correct	(title):	Homer wrote the Odyssey.
Incorrect	(exception):	public transport in the Hague (a redirect)
Correct	(exception):	public transport in The Hague
Correct	(exception 2):	competed in The Open Championship (a specific golf tournament conventionally styled this way)
Incorrect	(exception 2):	competed in The British Open (a redirect from a description not a name)

Titles of people

Offices, titles, and positions such as president, king, emperor, pope, bishop, abbot, and executive director are common nouns and therefore should be in lower case when used generically: Mitterrand was the French president or There were many presidents at the meeting. They are capitalized only in the following cases:

• When followed by a person's name to form a title, i.e., when they can be considered to have become part of the name: President Nixon, not president Nixon
• When a title is used to refer to a specific and obvious person as a substitute for their name, e.g., the Queen, not the queen, referring to Elizabeth II
• 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)

When an unhyphenated compound title such as vice president or chief executive officer is capitalized (unless this is simply because it begins a sentence), each word begins with a capital letter: On October 10, 1973, Vice President Agnew resigned and Gerald Ford was appointed to replace him. This does not apply to unimportant words such as the "of" in White House Chief of Staff John Doe. When hyphenated, as Vice-president is in some contexts other than U.S. politics, the second (and any subsequent) elements are not capitalized.

Honorifics and styles of nobility should normally be capitalized, e.g., Her Majesty, His Holiness.

Calendar items

See also: UniWiki:Manual of Style/Dates and numbers#Seasons

Capitalize the names of months, days, and holidays: June, Monday, Fourth of July, Michaelmas, the Ides of March. Seasons are uncapitalized (a hot summer) except when personified: Soon Spring will show her colors; Old Man Winter.

Science and mathematics

In the names of scientific and mathematical concepts, only proper names (or words derived from them) should be capitalized: Hermitian matrix or Lorentz transformation. However, some established exceptions exist, such as abelian group and Big Bang theory.

Celestial bodies

Template:Shortcut The words sun, earth, moon and solar system are capitalized (as proper names) when used in an astronomical context to refer to a specific celestial body (The Sun is the star at the center of the Solar System; the Moon orbits Earth). They are not capitalized when used outside an astronomical context (The sky was clear and the sun felt warm), or when used in a general sense (Io is a moon of Jupiter). However, they are capitalized in personifications, as in Sol Invictus ("Unconquered Sun") was the Roman sun god.

Names of planets, moons, asteroids, comets, stars, constellations, and galaxies are proper names and begin with a capital letter (The planet Mars can be seen tonight in the constellation Gemini, near the star Pollux). The first letter of every word in such a name is capitalized (Alpha Centauri and not Alpha centauri; Milky Way, not Milky way). In the case of compounds with generic terms such as comet and galaxy (but not star or planet), include the generic as part of the name and capitalize it (Halley's Comet is the most famous of the periodic comets; astronomers describe the Andromeda Galaxy as a spiral galaxy).

Geological periods

The names of formally defined geological periods and the rock layers corresponding to them are capitalized. Thus the Devonian Period or the Late Cretaceous Epoch are internationally defined periods of time, whereas the late Cretaceous is an unspecified time towards the end of the Cretaceous. Do not capitalize outside a complete formal name: thus the Devonian is a period rather than the Devonian is a Period.

Compass points

Template:Shortcut Points of the compass (north, north-east, southeast, etc.), and their derived forms (northern etc.) are not generally capitalized: nine miles south of Oxford, a northern road. They are capitalized only when they form part of a proper name, such as Great North Road.

Doubts frequently arise when referring to regions, such as eastern Spain and Southern California. If these have attained the status of proper names (as with North Korea, Southern California or Western Europe), then the direction word is capitalized. Otherwise it is not, as with eastern Spain or southwest Poland. If you are not sure whether a region has attained proper-name status, assume it has not.

Follow the same convention for related forms: a person from the Southern United States is a Southerner.

(Notice that compound compass points are usually joined in American English, for example northwest, while in British English they are sometimes written as separate words or hyphenated, as in north-west. This also affects names of regions such as Southeastern United States and South East England.)

Institutions

• Full names of institutions, organizations, companies, etc. (United States Department of State) are proper names and require capitals. Also treat as a proper name a shorter but still specific form, consistently capitalized in reliable generalist sources (e.g., US State Department or the State Department, depending on context).
  • Avoid ambiguous use of terms like "city"/"City" and "state"/"State" to indicate a governing body. Write clearly to indicate "the city council", the "state legislature", or "the state government".
  • The word the at the start of a title is uncapitalized, regardless of the institution's own usage (researchers at the Ohio State University not researchers at The Ohio State University).
  • If you are not sure whether the English translation of a foreign name is exact or not, assume it is rough and use lower case (e.g., the French parliament).
• Generic words for institutions, organizations, companies, etc., and rough descriptions of them (university, college, hospital, high school) do not take capitals:

Incorrect	(generic):	The University offers programs in arts and sciences.
Correct	(generic):	The university offers programs in arts and sciences.
Correct	(title):	The University of Delhi offers programs in arts and sciences.

• Political or geographical units such as cities, towns, and countries follow the same rules: As proper names they require capitals; but as generic words and rough descriptions (sometimes best omitted for simplicity) they do not.

Incorrect	(generic):	The City has a population of 55,000.
Correct	(generic):	The city has a population of 55,000.
Correct	(title):	The City of Smithville has a population of 55,000.
Correct	("city" omitted):	Smithville has a population of 55,000.
Exception	("City" used as proper name for the City of London):	In the medieval period, the City was the full extent of London.

Military terms

The general rule is that wherever a military term is an accepted proper name, as indicated by consistent capitalization in sources, it should be capitalized. Where there is uncertainty as to whether a term is generally accepted, consensus should be reached on the talk page.

• Military ranks follow the same capitalization guidelines as given under titles of people above. For example, Brigadier General John Smith, but John Smith was a brigadier general.
• Formal names of military units, including armies, navies, air forces, fleets, regiments, battalions, companies, corps, and so forth, are proper names and should be capitalized. However, the words for types of military unit (army, navy, fleet, company, etc.) do not require capitalization if they do not appear in a proper name. Thus, the American army, but the United States Army. Unofficial but well-known names should also be capitalized (the Green Berets, the Guard).

  Correct: the Fifth Company; the Young Guard; the company rallied.

  Incorrect: The Company took heavy losses. The 3rd battalion retreated.

• Accepted full names of wars, battles, revolts, revolutions, rebellions, mutinies, skirmishes, risings, campaigns, fronts, raids, actions, operations and so forth are capitalized (Spanish Civil War, Battle of Leipzig, Boxer Rebellion, Action of July 8, 1716, Western Front, Operation Sea Lion). The generic terms (war, revolution, battle) take the lowercase form when standing alone (France went to war; The battle began; The raid succeeded). As a rule of thumb, if a battle, war, etc. has its own Wikipedia article with capitalized name, the name should be capitalized in articles linked to it as it is in the article name.
• Proper names of specific military awards and decorations are capitalized (Medal of Honor, Victoria Cross).

Musical and literary genres

Names of musical or literary genres do not require capitalization at all, unless the genre name contains a proper name such as the name of a place. For example:

Incorrect: The Rouge Admins are a Goa Trance band.

Incorrect: The Rouge Admins are a goa trance band.

Correct: The Rouge Admins are a Goa trance band.

Incorrect: The French Boys are a Psychedelic Rock band.

Correct: The French Boys are a psychedelic rock band.

Incorrect: Asimov is widely considered a master of the Science-Fiction genre.

Correct: Asimov is widely considered a master of the science-fiction genre.

Incorrect: A genre of Music and Dance native to the Southern Spanish regions of Andalusia, Extremadura and Murcia is Flamenco.

Correct: A genre of music and dance native to the southern Spanish regions of Andalusia, Extremadura and Murcia is flamenco.

Radio formats such as adult contemporary or classic rock are also not capitalized.

Acronyms

Template:Shortcut

See also: Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Abbreviations#Acronyms

On Wikipedia, most acronyms are written in all capital letters (such as NATO, BBC, and JPEG). Wikipedia does not follow the practice of distinguishing between acronyms and initialisms. Do not write acronyms that are pronounced as if they were a word with an initial capital letter only, e.g. do not write UNESCO as Unesco, or NASA as Nasa.

• Some acronyms (mostly trademarks like Yahoo! and Taser) conventionally or officially use a mixture of capitals and lower-case letters, even non-letters; for any given example, use the spelling found in the majority of reliable, independent sources (e.g., LaTeX, M&Ms, 3M, and InBev). Do not mimic trademark stylization otherwise Template:Crossref.
• Non-trademarked acronyms that have become assimilated into English as everyday words may be written as common nouns when it is conventional to do so (e.g. scuba and laser, but ZIP code and bank PIN).

Use only source-attested acronyms; do not make up new ones (for example, the World Pool-Billiard Association is the WPA, and it is not referred to as the "WPBA").

"Also known as", when abbreviated on second or later occurrences, or in a table, should be given as a.k.a. or AKA (whichever reads easier in the context). Do not use aka, A/K/A, or other unusual renderings.

Expanded forms of abbreviations

Do not apply initial capitals in a full term that is a common noun just because capitals are used in its abbreviation.

Incorrect	(not a proper name):	We used Digital Scanning (DS) technology
Correct:		We used digital scanning (DS) technology
Correct:	(proper name):	produced by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC)

Similarly, when showing the source of an acronym or syllabic abbreviation, emphasizing the letters that make up the acronym is undesirable:

Incorrect: FOREX (FOReign EXchange)

Incorrect: FOREX (foreign exchange)

Correct: FOREX (foreign exchange)

If it is necessary to do so, for example, to indicate the etymology, use italics: FOREX (from "foreign exchange").

All caps

Avoid writing with all capitals, including small caps, when they have only a stylistic function. Reduce them to one of the other title cases or normal case, as appropriate.

• Reduce newspaper headlines and other titles from all caps to sentence case or title case. For example, replace the headline "WAR BEGINS TODAY" with "War begins today" or "War Begins Today".
• Reduce track titles on albums where all or most tracks are listed in all capitals. For which words should be capitalized, see Composition titles, below.
• Reduce court decisions from all caps. Write Roe v. Wade, even though the decision when issued was "ROE v. WADE".
• Reduce proclamations, such as those for the Medal of Honor, from all capitals.
• Reduce text written in all capitals in trademarks – see WP:Manual of Style/Trademarks.
• Reduce Latin quotations and terms from all capitals. See also WP:Manual of Style/Text formatting § Foreign terms.
• Do not write with all capitals for emphasis; italics are preferred (see Do not use for emphasis above).

Certain words may be written with all capitals or small capitals. Examples include:

• Acronyms and initialisms Template:See above
• In religion, renderings of the tetragrammaton; see Template:LORD
• In linguistics and philology, interlinear glossing of grammatical morphemes (as opposed to lexical morphemes), and transcription of logograms (as opposed to phonograms)
• Certain citation styles (e.g. that of the Linguistic Society of America or Bluebook) require that certain parts of the citation, such as author names in alphabetical reference sections be written in small caps. If an editor has chosen this style, it should be respected per WP:CITEVAR.
• Texts and example words in Classical Latin and Greek may be given in all or small caps to reflect the unicase letterforms of that era.

Trademarks

Main article: Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Trademarks

For trademarks, editors should choose among styles already in common use (not invent new ones) and among those use the style that most closely resembles standard English text formatting and capitalization rules. For trademarks that are given in mixed or non-capitalization by their owners (such as adidas), follow standard English text formatting and capitalization rules for proper names (in this case, Adidas). The mixed or non-capitalized formatting should be mentioned in the article lead, or illustrated with a graphical logo.

Trademarks beginning with a one-letter lowercase prefix pronounced as a separate letter, followed by a capitalized second letter, such as iPod and eBay, are written in that form if this has become normal English usage. For considerations relating to such items, see the following section.

Items that require initial lower case

In contexts where the case of symbols is significant, like those related to programming languages, mathematical notation (for example, the mathematical constant e is not equivalent to E), or the names of units of physical quantities or their symbols, the correct case should always be retained, even in situations where normal rules would require capitalization, such as at the beginning of a sentence. Try to avoid putting such lowercase symbols at the start of a sentence within running text. (See also Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Mathematics.)

Some individuals do not want their personal names capitalized. In such cases, Wikipedia articles may use lower case variants of personal names if they have regular and established use in reliable third-party sources (for example, k.d. lang). When such a name is the first word in a sentence, the rule for initial letters in sentences and list items should take precedence, and the first letter of the personal name should be capitalized regardless of personal preference.

For proprietary names such as eBay, see Trademarks above.

If an article title begins with such a letter that needs to be in lower case (as in the above examples), use the {{lowercase}} template or equivalent code. Note that it is not currently possible to make categories display with an initial lowercase letter in an article's category box. Hence the link to Category:eBay at the foot of the article eBay must display as "EBay". Similarly the article title eBay will be displayed as "EBay" in the category listing.

Anglo- and similar prefixes

Most words with prefixes such as Anglo-, Franco-, etc., are capitalized. For example, Anglo-Saxon, Anglo-French and Anglo-Norman are all capitalized. However, there is some variation concerning a small number of words of French origin. In French, these words are not capitalized, and this sometimes carries over to English. There are variations by country, and since editors often refer to only one dictionary, they may unwittingly contravene WP:Manual of Style § Varieties of English by changing usage to that of their own country. In general terms, Americans are most favourable to capitalization and Canadians least favourable, with other countries falling somewhere in between. The main exceptions to the capitalization rule are the following.

• anglicism, gallicism, etc. These words are often, but not always, capitalized. Anglicism is less likely to be capitalized in Canada.
• anglicize, gallicize, etc. Anglicize is often capitalized in the U.S., and sometimes in other countries. Gallicize is often capitalized in the U.S., and usually capitalized in other countries.
• anglophile, francophile, etc. Words in this category are usually capitalized both as nouns and adjectives, except in Canada, where they sometimes are.
• anglophobe, francophobe, etc. Words in this category are capitalized in all countries except Canada, where they sometimes are. The same applies to anglophobic.
• anglophone, francophone, etc. These words are often capitalized in the U.S. as adjectives, and usually as nouns. They are usually not capitalized in other countries, whether as nouns or adjectives.

Composition titles

Template:Merge to Template:Shortcut {{Wikipedia:Manual of Style/titles hatnote include|where=MOS:CAPS#CT}}

For title case, the words that are not capitalized (unless they are the first or last word of the title) are:

• Articles (a, an, the)
• Short coordinating conjunctions (and, but, or, Template:Nobr also for, yet, so when used as conjunctions)
• Prepositions containing four letters or fewer (as, in, of, on, to, for, from, like, over, with, etc.) but see below for instances where these words are not used as prepositions
• The word to in infinitives.

The following words should be capitalized in English-language titles:

• The first and last word of the title
• Every adjective, adverb, noun, pronoun and subordinating conjunction (Me, It, His, If, etc.)
• Every verb, including forms of to be (Be, Am, Is, Are, Was, Were, Been)
• Prepositions that contain five letters or more (During, Through, About, Until, Below, etc.)
• Words that have the same form as prepositions, but are not being used specifically as prepositions
  • Particles of phrasal verbs (e.g. "Give Up the Ghost", "Puttin' On the Ritz")
  • The first word in a compound preposition (e.g. "Time Out of Mind")

In hyphenated terms, capitalize each part according to the applicable rule (e.g. The Out-of-Towners), unless reliable sources consistently do otherwise for the work in question (e.g. The History of Middle-earth). For titles with subtitles or parenthetical phrases, capitalize as if they were separate titles (e.g. "(Don't Fear) The Reaper").

If a work is known by its first line of text and lacks a separate title, then the first line, rendered in sentence case, should be used as its title.

• An example of this would be Remember not, Lord, our offences, a musical setting of excerpted passage from a liturgical text:

Incorrect:		Remember Not, Lord, Our Offences
Correct:		Remember not, Lord, our offences

Template:ShortcutTemplate:Strong, even over time within the same language. Retain the style of the original for modern works, and follow the dominant usage in English-language reliable sources for historical works.

Template:Em: Template:Lang (French; the English title is Dangerous Liaisons)

Template:Em: Template:Lang (Spanish; the English title is The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha, or Don Quixote for short)

Template:Em: "Template:Lang" (German; there is no English title, though it translates as "Hymn to the Holy Ghost")

Non-English titles should be wrapped in the Template:Tlx template (inside surrounding italics or quotation marks), with the proper language code, e.g.: "{{lang|de|Hymnus an den heiligen Geist}}".