Forum:Multi-Word Capitalization

Recently, a capitalization change I made to 'sword beams' (I lower-cased it) on the Wooden Sword page was reversed w/ the comment "Actually linked to as a noun everywhere else." In fact, 'sword beams' is a noun either way; upper-casing it simply makes it a proper noun, which makes no more sense than does upper-casing 'arrows' or 'foot switches': both are commonly occurring items that bear no individual distinction from one another, whereas a proper noun denotes one specific, unique thing. However, since 'foot switch' actually is being upper-cased most of the time here, as are most other compound (multi-word) nouns, I thought this a good opportunity to bring up the issue in general rather than simply reinstate my edit.

So, does anyone know why we do this? I’d previously noticed that a link to a multi-word page (like Foot Switch) would fail if it was lower-cased w/in the brackets, & assumed that because of this, people had gotten into the habit of upper-casing these words all the time. However, if we’re capitalizing them deliberately rather than out of habit, we’re doing so in error. It gets debatable w/ things like Fire Arrows, but certainly soft soil, empty bottles, & several others have no right being referred to as proper nouns.

I've just been lower-casing these words as I come across them while editing, and linking to them as such: lower-case. Is it okay to continue doing so? I think the main worry here is that lower-casing them will create inconsistency, as there are many cases of these words being capitalized currently; but a.) that doesn’t strike me as the best reason to continue a grammatically incorrect practice on an encyclopedic website, & b.) this could actually be straightened out fairly quickly if we all just fix instances of it as we encounter them while editing. Doing so would also require very minimal effort on our part.

So yeah, another thing that probably 2.5 people besides me give a hoot about, but for better or worse, this is the type of stuff I notice. Thoughts? Knives182 (talk) 03:36, July 8, 2011 (UTC)