Editors sometimes draw on philosophical themes concerning proper names, in writing, editing, and discussing on Wikipedia – with confusing and sometimes strife-inducing results (most often at WP:Requested moves).
This is an essay on WP:Manual of Style, WP:Article titles, and WP:Requested moves. It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. This page is not an encyclopedia article, nor is it one of Wiki's policies or guidelines, as it has not been thoroughly vetted by the community. Some essays represent widespread norms; others only represent minority viewpoints. |
This page in a nutshell: Wikipedia capitalizes words and phrases if they are treated across independent reliable sources as proper names (or as appropriately associated with or derived from proper names) in accord with findings in modern linguistics. Philosophical treatments of proper names are far less helpful or relevant in editing and discussing changes on Wiki English. |
Such themes are far less relevant for writing and editing the encyclopedia; only the linguistics take on proper names is truly useful and relevant in determining matters of written formal-English orthography, especially matters of capitalization. Predominant usage in reputable nonfiction publishers is of paramount importance, as repeatedly made clear in our own Wiki: Manual of Style.
For other philosophers, the expression Virginia is indeed a genuine proper name in its own right, even when unattached to any context of use. For them, the fact that many proper names are intrinsically generic presents no problem. It is the versatile proper name Virginia that successfully refers, in various contexts of use, to a US state, a famous author, a battleship, an opal miner, and so on. Still others who consider the matter as philosophers draw different conclusions.
This significant philosophical issue does not figure prominently in linguistic discussions of proper names, and it is irrelevant in determining the status of expressions (to settle questions of capitalization, for example) on Wiki English.
It's unfortunate that theory about proper names is pursued in two separate though overlapping literatures, each with its particular emphases and concerns. They use divergent lines of analysis: those developed in linguistics are highly relevant on Wikipedia, while those prominent in philosophy are rarely useful for anyone editing or applying style guidelines and title policy.
The linguistics take on proper names has implications for how to style a name, according to the languages, registers, and styles used at any particular article. Great difficulties arise in wrangling with definitional approaches that are only apt in the philosophy take on proper names. Such distractions are a major reason for Wikipedia's style guide adopting a simple default rule, the first one at WP:Manual of Style/Capital letters (or WP:MOSCAPS): Do not capitalize an expression unless the overwhelming majority of independent reliable sources do so for that specific expression, in the context of the relevant article.
It is not possible for this rule, or any style rule, to keep everyone happy on every occasion. That's the nature of rules. We just have to live with it and move on, because the purpose of our rules is not propounding deep truths or righting great wrongs, but providing a consistent presentation for readers, and (secondarily) causing a reduction of recurrent "bikeshedding" strife between editors over the styling details in Wikipedia text.
Because philosophy-based treatments of proper name have nothing to do with style, and aren't really applicable to anything we do in writing an encyclopedia, drawing on them brings confusion. Examples:
The short answer: Because it is not conventional to capitalize these elements, in encyclopedic writing. That is, current English does not treat the relevant expressions as proper names (or as associated with proper names) in the ways covered by modern linguistic theory. Consequently, they are not generally capitalized in our source material, especially secondary sources written for a general audience.
It may be conventional to capitalize some of them in specific kinds of writing. Ornithology and herpetology journals frequently do capitalize the vernacular names of species, for example, primarily as a form of disambiguation because so many birds, reptiles, and amphibians have names that are easily confused with visual descriptions. But it is not broadly accepted to capitalize them outside of specialized writing – and an encyclopedia is the complete opposite of specialized writing.
Each of those example questions has a more specific answer; most of the answers can be discovered easily at WP:MOS and its subsidiary pages: our Wikipedia style guide.
Dwelling on philosophical shades of meaning and uncertainty concerning the notion of proper name (knowingly, or merely from a linguistically uninformed stance) will soon clash with Wiki: Policies and guidelines. Conflicts with the style guidelines will arise, along with failures to abide by core content policies. For example, a "philosophical" obsession with questions of meaning and uniqueness inspires some editors to misuse capitalization to signify, as an unencyclopedic form of emphasis. This is often an unnecessary attempt at disambiguation, in an unhelpfully compressed "expert to expert" style of presentation. Better just to write more clearly from the start, for a broad audience. Wikipedia science and humanities articles are not written like submissions to academic journals, any more than our articles on pop musicians are written in the style of Spin or Rolling Stone magazines, or those on Catholicism or Shinto read as if written by priests.
Over-capitalization inspired by a felt need to signify is also done for signaling of subjective importance or status of the subject in the mind of the editor: an obvious failure to maintain the WP:Neutral point of view. Similarly, importing or inventing a capitalization scheme that only makes sense in the light of personal conviction is a form of WP:Original research: almost a kind of language-change advocacy. If an overwhelming majority of reliable sources, across all of English writing (not just within a particular subfield's specialist publications), do not conventionally capitalize the relevant expressions, then there is in fact no such convention. Insisting otherwise is personal preference, not a real-world fact that passes Wikipedia's stringent WP:Verifiability standards.
Philosophical analysis of proper names is irrelevant to how we on Wikipedia settle detailed styling in articles, versus what other publishers may choose to do.
Meanwhile, the linguistic approach presents different evidence and guides to action depending on the language. In English especially, proper names are intimately bound up with orthography. Adjectives like Italian are derived from proper names, and in English this is usually sufficient to make them capitalised; but they may not be capitalised in Spanish, French, or many other "alphabetic" languages (the detailed differences are complex, as discussed at Proper name). Some alphabetic and all non-alphabetic scripts lack capitalization entirely; so our familiar linguistic understandings of proper names would need rethinking from scratch, in dealing with those languages. Even in English we use capitalization for many purposes, such as situationally or contextually at the start of a sentence or in main words in headings or the titles or works, etc. And most acronyms and initialisms are capitalized throughout.
These are matters of convention, not philosophical principle. And as conventions they are looser than many would like. Various proper names do not receive capitals, e.g. k.d. lang, danah boyd (because of the owners' preferences). Others receive them where most expressions do not, as in The Hague (with a capital T on historical grounds alone); and iPhone is given a capital in mid-word only (out of respect for intellectual property). None of these examples suits a particular philosophical categorization, nor even some genuine linguistic principle. They are determined solely by convention.
These language-usage vagaries are just not connected in any Wikipedia-relevant way to the philosophy use of the phrase proper name. To the extent any linguists and philosophers are trying (largely in vain) to merge the two concepts, various papers and rather expensive books are still being published on such ideas. Philosophers disagree with each other (over quite a variety of quibbles) about what qualifies as a proper name, and the same is true (though perhaps less so) in linguistics. E.g., not all linguists are convinced that South Africa is truly a proper name, while all of them agree that Africa by itself is one. Some also do not accept plurals or terms with "the" as proper names; for them, Turk is a proper name but the Turks is not, though it is to many others, including mainstream publishers). Yet another variable element is whether: a) the name is purely descriptive, which may not qualify as a proper name to anyone (my neighbor's largest dog, or 27th ascent of Mount Everest); or b) it originated as literal description but is no longer interpreted that way, a may thus have mutated into a proper name according to some, especially if convention capitalizes it: Northern Hemisphere); versus c) it is completely non-descriptive, in English anyway (Indira Gandhi, Kodak – definitely proper names); or d) it is only descriptive in a metaphorical or evocative sense (Rocky Mountains, Pacific Ocean, Great War) – cases which more easily qualify for the label proper name (quibbles about a leading the aside) to more linguists and philosophers alike than do mostly-just-descriptive names such as Northern Hemisphere, South African Navy, and World War I.
Such debates have gone on for over 200 years, and will not be settled any time soon. Definitional struggles and publications related to them have had no palpable impact on such questions in the world at large, and thus none on how Wikipedia approaches proper names – as conventionalized proper-noun phrases (and their modifier derivatives in most cases), following the dominant usage in English-language nonfiction from reputable publishers. Wikipedia will not play a part in attempting to settle these questions; that is not the encyclopedia's role, nor part of the Wiki Foundation's mission.
Yet another way of looking at this is transmission versus reception of meaning. The key to the meaning of proper name in linguistics is authorial intent, or editorial knowledge. It does not matter for this definition whether readers in the aggregate, or a particular reader, get the intended meaning. What matters is that the writer is broadcasting a meaning that points to a specific (though not necessarily singular) referent, using a name conventionally treated as proper. The key to the meaning of proper name in philosophy is whether a competent reader (or competent readers in the aggregate) can get the intended specific-referent meaning. The philosophic properness of the name effectively only exists on the receiving end. Or it can be thought of as a probability, derived from the percentage of accurate audience inference of the specific subject from an attempt at proper naming. The writer/speaker will probably have an intuitive sense of how high the probability is for a particular audience and context.
While both the linguistic and philosophical approaches to proper naming could be thought of as at least slightly informing the first three criteria of our WP:Article titles policy – recognizability, naturalness, and precision – it is not helpful to try to talk about these in terms of the philosophy of names, and they are not grounded in philosophy; the relationship is coincidental at best. These title criteria are not theoretical at all, but pure-practicality matters of clarity in writing and in information architecture.
Philosophy arguments about proper names are confusing to the vast majority of editors, who are steeped necessarily in the more applicable linguistic sense of proper name (and the most everyday version of that sense).
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