User talk:Randy Kryn

• An editing respite
• Some useful things from a non-medical non-professional: Tom Brady follows the hydration route (1/2 your weight in number of ounces per day, i.e. if someone weighs 180 pounds hydrate 90 ounces of water a day), and look where it GOAT him. Then what about Linus Pauling advocating at least two grams a day of ascorbic acid (Vitamin C) divided into several equal portions (morning-afternoon-evening), you'd almost think he wanted people healthy. And last but least, microwave an ear of corn for four minutes, with the husk left on — if two ears, double it to eight minutes. When you peel off the husk and eat the thing, you'll thank me later.
• Now you know: Saverland v Newton
• Remembering four of the last eight Earthlings to travel to the Moon, murdered soon after their return, sadly bookending the first two Moon pioneers murdered three weeks after arriving safely back on Earth.
• Maybe my best geek edit: A five cushion bank shot italicizing Star Trek and Buffy links on Wikipedia's Klingon language page.
• An IP upon realizing that birds are dinosaurs, and a nod to our dinosaur brothers and sisters.
• Write on!: Don't kick the Ouija board
• An IP's inadvertent poetically sexist edit, which they quickly corrected
• Perhaps my best one-word edit (although...)
• Ready to check out the size of the Solar System? No small children or comfort animals on board please, and keep your arms and stuff where you can see them: If the Moon were only 1 Pixel (web based scroll map scaled to the Moon being, well, 1 pixel)
• A sci-fi short story plot (dibs)

. . .Veiled Christ, a statue in Italy that depicts a knobbly-kneed Christ in the tomb, please give the image two or three clicks. This almost unbelievable 1753 sculpture ("how'd he do that?"), carved from one piece of marble, has one of only two Wikipedia article's which have to prove, with sources, that the artwork was not the work of an alchemist. Step right up, and don't miss the modern looking couch, the two tasseled pillows, or the crown of thorns and other torture things down by the feet. All carved from a single block of marble.

Literally steps away from Veiled Christ sits another "how'd he do that?" sculpture, also carved from a single block of marble (or created by alchemy).

p.s. While writing aloud about impossible statues carved from one piece of rock...who can forget flowers made of glass!

Watching Secretariat run his 1973 Triple Crown races in order while knowing three things: 1) Secretariat's trainer and jockey realized after the second race that the horse could run full speed from start to finish. 2) While drastically being held back during the Kentucky Derby and Preakness, Secretariat still holds the fastest time in all three Triple Crown races. 3) Sham - the horse Secretariat trashed like a dancing bear in the Kentucky Derby - still holds the Derby's second fastest time.

Here's the 1973 Kentucky Derby...Secretariat's jockey holds him back...holds him wayyyy back, almost last place. Next the Preakness...holds him back... And then: the Belmont..."He is moving like a tre-men-dous machine".

• ...winner of the 2017 "Shakespearean dramatic romantic tragic tale in six words" Heisman.

July 8, 2022: during three edits in three minutes an IP proposes marriage on the same page as the above masterpiece, creating their own. Wikipedians have a romantic side, even the bots, so nobody reverted until I did after two hours with a note saying that it should be enough time, and wished him luck. Does anyone know of an earlier proposal on Wikipedia, especially on such a good page for it and so perfectly played out - he seemingly decides to marry her right there, between two edits. Film scene scenario worthy (Hallmark, are you listening?).

The docents ask people: "Find the cat". Letting the coolness of it lead me to break my oath as a Wikipedian, I now self-identify as a vandal. (in other vandal news, in 2023 an IP spent a great deal of time removing all the vowels from several articles. Wh ddn't thnk f tht?).

See and listen to Wikipedia edits as they occur. Designed by Stephen LaPorte and Mahmoud Hashemi of hatnote.com, the link was copied from a user page, don't remember where, but deservedly displayed on quite a few as well as having its own article. Just who is making all this noise? Well...

Here is Paine Ellsworth's subpage about how many Wikipedians can dance on the head of a pin.

Thanks for the review. I made the image in the infobox larger. I had also planned to add a close-up for the reason you describe but I was unable to find the high-resolution image. Apparently, for whatever reason, the museum deleted it from the webpage. Not sure why. One would think that there would be copies floating around, but there aren't. I spent 30 minutes looking for them. Viriditas (talk) 21:39, 25 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

You're very welcome Viriditas, it's a really nice article (I'll link it in the section title). A zoom-in on the painting itself clearly shows his style, which has always impressed and touched me. Some of his work seems almost surreal in how he was able to float colors and shapes. Have always sought him out in art museums, and the individuals in his portraits seem static while their clothing and backgrounds seem to me the real artwork. Randy Kryn (talk) 23:26, 25 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

What bothers me the most is that there isn't a single image of a painting on Wikipedia that comes close to seeing it in real life. As an idea or concept, this didn't occur to me until I went to the De Young Museum in the late 2000s and saw Monet's The Magpie in the flesh when it was on a touring exhibition (which is why I wrote the article). That experience led to a brief moment of fleeting Stendhal syndrome, and I almost collapsed on the ground in front of hundreds of people. Luckily, the feeling only lasted a few seconds, but it was then that I realized that the technology we use to portray art on Wikipedia (if not the larger internet) is bad. Viriditas (talk) 23:35, 25 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Nice story, you're lucky to have had that experience (sounds like a quick brain chemistry change induced learning curve). Interesting concept that there may be a better technology to portray art on Wikipedia. Wouldn't that be nice. Why don't you mention that idea on the Wikiproject Visual Arts page and we'll find out if there has been such a tech breakthrough and, if not, why not. Many of the images on Wikipedia and Commons can be zoomed-in on to observe very close detail. One of my "in the flesh" stories was a surprise invite to MoMA before I knew it existed, where I rounded a corner and there was van Gogh's The Starry Night. Had it to myself for many minutes. The surprise was how little of the canvas he actually painted on, the work includes a large percentage of unpainted canvas. I haven't seen that portrayed well on any image of the painting (unless maybe if zoomed-in on). Randy Kryn (talk) 23:49, 25 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

p.s. interesting - I just tried to zoom-in on File:Van Gogh - Starry Night - Google Art Project.jpg and on the first click just got a totally black screen. Randy Kryn (talk) 23:52, 25 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah, the zoom doesn't work at all in Firefox. Viriditas (talk) 00:03, 26 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Butting in, The Gust of Wind is a lovely article on a work had not seen before. Well done. Ceoil (talk) 01:37, 26 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you. Viriditas (talk) 03:44, 26 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Randy, per conversations here and elsewhere we probably shouldn’t be adding currency conversions due to overwhelming complexity of the problem. And the source you’re using isn’t reliable, so we can’t use that. Best to leave it out of the article for now and strike up a discussion elsewhere. Also, you shouldn’t be reviewing and making edits like that, just one or the other. If you want to ask for a second review, that’s fine, as you have to review the criteria and make it explicit in your review that you completed the checks. That means either using the review template that’s provided or adding the criteria manually. Viriditas (talk) 03:44, 26 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Okay. Thanks. Randy Kryn (talk) 03:50, 26 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

What bothers me the most is that there isn't a single image of a painting on Wikipedia that comes close to seeing it in real life.

Followup to my comment: see Mountain Landscape#Reproductions. Serendipity strikes again. Viriditas (talk) 03:53, 1 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks Viriditas, that's an interesting section. You'd think that someone would put on their science and/or photographic genius cap and find a work-around to this problem, especially using today's tech. Capturing images such as paintings in real-life quality, and translating those images to web capability, could be a priority in computer tech. Elon Musk could do it in an hour or two with one hand tied behind his other hand, but maybe hasn't thought of it. Randy Kryn (talk) 10:12, 1 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Read On Freedom (2024) by Timothy Snyder. You will think differently about this. Viriditas (talk) 10:09, 3 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Shirley you're familiar with WP:Queen Elizabeth slipped majestically into the water? EEng 03:47, 26 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Well, my uncle was a Navy man, and was fond of all the shes he sailed. Randy Kryn (talk) 03:55, 26 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

To follow up from the RM stuff (in a very rambling way, alas, as I'm well-caffeinated and there's a lot involved): For my part, I never invoke IAR unless the existing rules (about whatever) completely fail to handle an unusual case sensibly, no other rule or combination of rules seem to override/counteract that one, and ignoring the rule produces an objective improvement to the encyclopedia (or as objective as we can reasonably be as humans, i.e. virtually everyone will agree that ignoring the rule in that case will produce better results for readers and that imposing conformity to a mis-fitting rule will make the result worse). The cases in which IAR is actually validly invoked are very rare, more so over time as our ruleset encompasses more edge cases.

Nearly every time I see someone citing IAR, it is to get a subjective preference against considerable push-back (on the merits, not just "the rule says ..." robotic responses). IAR is usually demanded when someone also doesn't understand the interplay of various rules, and facts/observations about the case in question, and other factors. That is, most of the time, the rule is not actually broken with regard to the case at hand; the IAR-claimant simply hasn't looked and thought more carefully. WP isn't a rigid legal system, but a system of various interacting concerns that are balanced with each other, and the exact landing point is often variable.

At that particular RM (the M3 scout car) we have a complex interplay of concerns: First is whether one set of aggregate data has been improperly skewed, since it doesn't match multiple other sets of aggregate data, and the timeline strongly indicates skew. We have a WP:CONSISTENT policy principle (which people often misinterpret in various ways, either as something they can game by making a bunch of stuff do what they prefer, without consensus, then demand everything else be changed to comply with the "new consistency"; or as something that requires a senseless, Procrustean consistency even when the cases are dissimilar in substantive ways but the linguistic structure of the constructions is accidentally similar). We have a rule to not impose capitalization unless it's remarkably consistent in the sources (not just the most recent ones, though pre-modern ones, like from the Victorian era, would probably not be useful for much of any RM question). We also have a tendency but not a rule to lean more heavily on newer sources on style questions, since language changes over time, sometimes even just within a few years. That tendency has in this instance run up against what seems to be a data set "poisoned" by citogenesis; plus we have absolutely zero evidence of a generalized increase in capitalization of "military stuff" as a real-world consensus among professional writers; capitalization is actually going down in that topic area as in almost all others. [Aside: The main exception I can think of is MOS:SIGCAPS stuff promoted by left-wing activists, especially the bad habit creeping into even some humanities and sociology journals of capitalizing "indigenous", "native", and similar terms any time they are applied to humans, whether the group in question has adopted the term as (or as part of) a proper name they choose to go by. And a similar bad habit of capitalizing any bulk term for religio-spiritual groups, e.g. "Neo-Paganism", "Witches and Druids", "New Religious Movements", "Protestant Denominations", "New Age Practitioners", etc. It's badly PoV-pushing and thus unencyclopedic.]

The kind of case presented with the M3 thing is complex if one wants to make it complex, but it need not actually be: the overall pattern of this entire type of RM (that is, the consistency of the RM consensus results) is to use lower-case except for actual proper-name parts like "M3" or "Winchester". The lower-casing is strongly consistent also with treatment of directly comparable topics that are not military, like merchant vessel types, personal and commercial vehicle classes, private-sector firearms, civilian outdoors gear, etc. So, unless there is an overwhelming, objective reason, a community certainty, that imposing capitalization in this instance will palpably benefit readers (not just please certain editors), despite sharply diverging from the rest of practice (lowercase practice), then we should not impose that capitalization (or, in this instance, retain it). Another way of looking at this particular case and its ngram weirdness is also that MOS:CAPS permits us to capitalize when it seems to be done consistently across a substantial majority of indy RS (an illusion in this case, as shown by GScholar with actually examinable sources). MOS:CAPS doesn't actually require us to capitalize in such a case (even in the absence of the kind of ngram doubt we have in this instance). We shouldn't when this will fail WP:CONSISTENT or likely cause other problems (like inspiring a bunch of relitigation to try to force previously decided lower-casings to be reverted to be "consistent" with the new odd outlier; or inspire "I WON on one, finally, so this is a sign that I should devote all my WP time to fighting against any and all lower-casing because I really like capital letters" behavior).

Sometimes there are exception cases, on the merits not just editorial preference, and sometimes we even end up codifying them as a type of programmatic exception (at least on style matters; not for core policy stuff). E.g., MOS:INITIALS was formerly one-size fits all, but there are sufficient edge cases like CCH Pounder, who is on record that her name is officially, from her viewpoint, "CCH" not "C.C.H." or "C. C. H.", and independent sources go along with this, almost always rendering it "CCH" even if their house style would normally include dots. So, a combination of our "follow the sources" general practice and the WP:ABOUTSELF policy interact to basically force an exception (without ever mentioning IAR; it's not ignoring a rule, in a vaccuum, its weighing competing rules and practices holistically). There turned out to be more of them like this CC Sabathia is one that I remember off the top of my head), so that guideline's been adjusted. Not because anyone went on a style holywar to change it, but because the RM process was consistently producing this type of exception when the subject was proven to prefer it and the sources generally "obeyed" in that person's case. Same with rare all-lowercase personal names like danah boyd, k.d. lang (another MOS:INITIALS exception too, with no space), and bell hooks. Various cases get rejected (especially if demanding ALL-CAPS) because sources don't usually go along with them, and often because the subjects themselves have not been consistent about it. [Aside: due to WP:OFFICIALNAME and MOS:TM, this kind of deference to subject preference generally only applies to individuals, and not to more outlandish stylizations even for them. It is akin to gender-identity preference and deadnaming issues (and neopronouns being too outlandish for our readership). The existence of one kind of exception for specific reasons doesn't mean every kind of exception anyone wants is going to be community-accepted. Exceptions are "expensive" in mutiple ways.]

Anyway, what's not happening is discovery of a bunch of a military vehicle/weapon/gear types that palpably need to be made "capitalize all the words" exceptions on the basis of multiple policy/guideline and reality-in-the-world and demonstrably-better-for-the-readers concerns that collectively override WP's lowercase-by-default practice. If there were such a dire need for it, we would expect MOS:MIL to have already identified it and shored it up with sourcing, and for WP:MILHIST regulars to have applied considerable group pressure at WT:MOSCAPS to have it mentioned somewhere in the main MOS:CAPS in summary after it had already been worked into MOS:MIL in detail. But the opposite has happened: MOS:MIL (at MOS:MILCAPS in particular) basically just restates the lead of MOS:CAPS but in topic-specific terms. There is no subject-matter-experts and subject-matter-focused-editors "local consensus" that some kind of programmatic divergence is needed (that can be backed up as more than subjective WP:SSF whim, like so many tried-and-failed cases before). WP:MILHIST is not collectively behind this recent spate of tooth-and-nail fighting against MOS:CAPS applying to military subjects; it's a handful of outliers, specifically ones who have in their head idiosyncratic ideas of what capitalization is for and what "proper name" means, ideas that do not align with WP practice. (They really should read WP:PNPN which explains much of this in layman's terms: in short, there are various proper-name-related ideas from philosophy rather than linguistics, and people latch onto and get confused by them, but they have no implications of any kind for capitalization or any other writing-style matter, and their injection into RM and related discussions tends to just produce communication failure and a WP:GREATWRONGS entrenchment.)

I will now stop typing faster than a professional secretary, and will get out of your talk-hair.
 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  08:20, 26 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

To be short and as stated (in the face of your long essay and point of view, and thanks for the fuller explanation), I will not support or oppose the RM in question, was just pointing out what I perceived as a round-about use of IAR without actually invoking it in so many words. My most recent use of invoking IAR, the tectonic plate discussion, rested on the fact that the most prominent features of or atop a plate are uppercased as proper names and, as the largest named features of the planet, the plates themselves (North American Plate etc.) should remain uppercased as proper names per the "maintain" wording of IAR. Randy Kryn (talk) 12:29, 26 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah, my over-caffeinated point wasn't to try to convince you to support or oppose in that particular RM, but to explore some rationales and approaches that should apply more broadly. If this level of continued chatterboxing about these matters is unwanted, let me know. I'm hoping to get at better mutual understanding and ease the "we wax sorely pissed at each other" miasma arising largely since the football drafts thing.

As for the tectonic plates case, okay, I can see that argument, but it's a good example of what I mean by IAR claims being usually subjective. A counter would be that the one (proper-named) thing being on top of, or supported by, or a piece of the other (lower-cased) thing is generally immaterial. Specifically, the tectonic plates are part of the Earth's crust (not "Crust"), in turn part of its lithosphere (not "Lithosphere"), which intergrades with Earth's mantle (not "Mantle"). But, yeah, it's "Earth" as an astronomical body, to be consistent with "Mars", etc. (though not without some dispute about this; some RfC about it will probably come up again). Going in the other direction: part of the North American plate is of course North America, and within that is the US, and within that California, then San Francisco, and even Golden Gate Park within the city. Yet "Stanton's apartment in San Francisco" is even more specific but not a capitalized proper name; same with "the corner of 10th Street and Market Street" or "the northeastern neighborhoods of San Francisco", etc., etc. The specific neighborhood "South of Market" or "SoMA" for short is now a proper name, though it was formerly (as "south of Market") just a vague description of part of town before being codified into a defined neighborhood with boundaries. In a looser analogy, the Empire State Building has a foundation, and it would be possible to write about that foundation as a discrete topic (perhaps not encyclopedically, but in an architectural history journal). It would be "the foundation of the Empire State Building" not "the Foundation of the Empire State Building"; it being foundational (something on which a proper-named thing is based/dependent) doesn't make it a proper name. Compositional analogy: My housemate's cats are Bunter and Hunter, proper names, and they are calicos, i.e. compositionally a subset of the set "calico cats" – a coat-pattern classification, not a standardized breed with a proper name, so not "Calico Cats" or "Calico cats" or "Calicos". Even capitalizing standarized breeds is iffy (common in non-independent and specialized sources, not in general-audience ones like newspapers), but settled on WP at least for now by an RfC several years ago.

We can't practicably impose an artificial consistency across things that just seem interrelated, a step-wise progression, or a dependency chain, nor just in some ways comparable, because they are not in all ways analogous, and capitalization is to a large extent a matter of rather arbitrary and variable convention. The best we can do is try to balance being conceptually consistent when things are very closely analogous, and going along with any usage so conventionalized that almost all sources are doing the same thing.

A few editors appear to have a fondness for using capitalization to signify a (subjective) sense of importance, scale, significance, influence, popularity, etc. But this is not well-accepted outside of certain non-encyclopedic writing styles like marketing and bureaucratese, plus some topical specialist contexts. MOS:SIGCAPS is specifically against doing it, as is the MOS:CAPS lead principle. Capitalization for signification happens when one of the several conflicting philosophy definitions, a round peg, is jammed prescriptively into the square linguistic hole of capitalization convention. From a descriptive linguistics perspective, a proper name in the written style sense, the one we care about for RM purposes, is simply that which nearly all the language's users agree to treat as one by capitalizing it. This often "violates" most of the philosophy definitions; e.g., "the Mexican–American War" cannot be a proper name under most of those because it is descriptive in structure (and also takes a "the"), while from a linguistics perspective that's all entirely irrelevant.

I think a lot of confusion and strife arises about this stuff because of MOS:PROPER, a fragment of an old stand-alone page on proper names which was MfDed or otherwise demoted, but this portion kept and merged into MOS:CAPS (without much attention or revision) because it seemed vaguely useful. That material can be, with some strenous and confused or gaming effort, misinterpreted to imply that anything that "might" or "should" be a proper name, that someone somewhere claims is a proper name or likes to think of as at least as important as something else that does clearly have a proper name, must be capitalized, as if that section is somehow an exception to all other principles including the lead rule of MOS:CAPS. But of course the community doesn't interpret it this way by consensus, and it was not the intent of the material when it was written. The text in question needs a revision (I started drafting one about 4 years ago but forgot about it) to prevent this kind of misinterpretation, and that would likely go a long way to easing capitals-related strife at RM and elsewhere, specifically by short-circuiting a lot of "is" or "should be" a proper name philosophy arguments (which are all ultimately OR and POV because, even within philosophy, how to define the concept has been ragingly argued for over two centuries). We have an aggregate sourcing standard for a practical reason, even though it sometimes results in inconsistencies (like Spider-Man: Far From Home with capitalized "From", and The Hague with capitalized "The" in mid-sentence). Tolerating a few exceptions based on overwhelming source usage (that isn't citogensis) costs us less as a community than trying to force rigid adherence to a rule or to an excessive consistency that doesn't serve an actual purpose.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  20:02, 26 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks SMcCandlish, will read this tomorrow (War and Peace comes to mind). I can tell it will be interesting but if I start I'll have to read it all and reply, and have planned to do an uppercase run for awhile. You probably mentioned the plate tectonics result, which, if you didn't know, is also being discussed at Dicklyon's page, which I'll check later to see if its progressed (that one may interest you as well). Randy Kryn (talk) 01:58, 27 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Appreciate you being willing to entertain this much material! I have not been closely following the plates thing; while DL's page is on my watchlist, I haven't checked in on it lately.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  22:17, 27 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Earth's crust, when divided into its individually named segments (the tectonic plates), seems "important" enough to uppercase (even with mixed casing usage, which brought about the "come on, let's use commonsense" appeal). Just a difference of opinion, and probably both of us can see that all "sides" have enough sources and adequate reasonings to allow room at such RMs for heated (pun intended) disagreements. To some of us, individual tectonic plates remain large singular things which have proper names, and it seems unreasonable to me to claim that they don't (hence asking for a commonsense IAR "exception"). But the sloppy use of these proper names in sources account for many writers using lowercase, which leads to mixed styling, which on Wikipedia then means we accept the error and not the logical naming. The result becomes enough of a shift (see what I did there) to do a follow-up with the closer and then (unless they wake up reasonable) an RM close objection discussion.

That aside, you present good examples of where to draw the line. The consistency ask of "80%-90% uppercase in n-grams or else it's lowercased" seems awful high, and pulling that back to a reasonable 60% would end almost all disagreement. Existing exceptions, such as Earth, Moon, and Sun being given commonsense passes (i.e. "that giant life-giving nuclear furnace in the sky deserves a proper name"), and keeping MOS:PROPER (which leans toward commonsense) give Wikipedia some balance. But lowercasing what appear to be proper names confounds some of us. That aside, and disregarding the dispute of NFL draft or Draft (which was both about the casing and where it should be decided, with the final decision arguably IAR), major full arguments are actually few and kind-of far between. I would like to see things like Civil Rights Movement and United States Capitol Rotunda uppercased, and thought I gave good IAR arguments at their RMs. But I'm also used to "losing" some of these discussions, and move on comfortably once they conclude (although I expect them to be brought up another day, either by myself or by a random IP astonished at the casing). I better end this post so breathing room is sustained. Thanks ((u|SMcCandlish}} for this discussion, and although we will continue to meet on the jousting fields, you already know that I admire what you have accomplished with the Wikipedia Manual of Style (and woe to those who wish to lowercase to "manual of style"), which can be equated to leaps-of-Wikipedia such as the major coding breakthroughs and the early policies (which, although refined, include the many-carated diamond, IAR). Randy Kryn (talk) 15:06, 27 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I'll lead with pleasantries over debate: Thank you as well for engaging in detailed discussion of such things. It's helpful to hash stuff out in just-a-discussion style instead of a !voting process, especially after a period of loggerheads and even mutual irritation. You give me way too much credit with regard to MoS! I've written a few non-trivial bits of it, but most of the important stuff pre-dates me, and I just try to keep it understandable and stable. "Lowercase to 'manual of style'": I would actually prefer that it be "WP:Manual of style" to agree with our title-case treatment of other "WP:..." pages, but its style (treating it as something of an e-book or other publication) was set long before I arrived, and I'm not sure what appetite there would be for normalizing it. Same cleanup is also needed for some wikiproject pages and other stuff, but it seems too trivial to attact much interest.

"80%-90% uppercase in n-grams or else it's lowercased" seems awful high, and pulling that back to a reasonable 60% would end almost all disagreement. Would not be workable and would be problematic for numerous reasons. It would vastly multiply, not end, disagreement. We already know this because of the level of conflict before the present standard was implemented. A 60%-ish standard would amount to MOS:CAPS being changed to read "capitalized inconsistently, even in a slight majority of independent reliable sources", and this (even if rephrased in more crafty language) is clearly nothing like the standard that the community wants or could practicably use. Every capitalization question would be a knock-down-drag-out fight, characterized by cherry-picking to such an extent that a body of RM responders would generally be completely unable to assess whether a real majority was provable. As with too-close elections in the real-world, it would encourage polarization, antagonism, and activism to push the ball back over the line. Due to ngrams, GScholar, GBooks, and other aggregate usage data being based on a constrained number of sources in any given year, the count would veer around year by year resulting in numerous "counter-RMs", potentially across thousands of articles, as soon as someone felt they had a number shift they could demonstrate (which might then re-reverse a year later; single authors/publishers can have marked effects on ngram results, especially for more obscure strings). Just the fact that you want some of your pet peeves like the CRM [1] and the rotunda [2] to be relitigated is a clear indication how this would play out. (Any edge case is going to displease many people no matter which way it goes, and the CRM in particular is also subject to especially leftwing socio-political capitalization bias/advocacy, as with several other topics; on the other, it's difficult to see any objective reason to capitalize part of a building instead of a stand-alone structure, but this is why we use an aggregate sourcing standard, so no your-opinion-versus-mine is removed as a factor.)

Your "about 60%" proposal would just defeat the whole point. WP should agree with the real-world consensus in reliable sources. MOS:CAPS's standard is WP:DUE policy applied directly to a style question. Because we must pick one rendering or another in order to write (we can't take a "some sources say this, others say that" approach as we would for, e.g., whether panspermia is a fringe theory), we have an objective standard to apply instead of a subjective "importance" approach. It's an inspecific numeric standard, of "substantial majority" (because the community is not fond of bright-line cutoffs), but the RM track record (i.e. the community) has made it clear that this translates to about a 90+% rate. Not as low as the 80% you splitballed, though a particular RM could conceivably go that way, depending on who participated and why. The ~90% level is practical because a ratio that high cannot be convincingly faked through any form of cherrypicking, as long as examiners of the question look at multiple aggregations of data (just ngrams alone are sometimes not enough, especially if some alleged shift in usage corresponds to WP's own influence on low-end source material). And a ratio that high is almost never going to suddenly shift for legitmate reasons, so our standard produces long-term article title stability. A ratio that high also serves community purpose in another way: protracted disruptive "rebellion" against its application to someone's pet topic is addressable as a editorial behavior issue, as anti-consensus and anti-RS agitation for PoV-pushing purposes, instead of "just a difference of opinion". Aside: Another reason we know that using a ~60% standard would not produce less dispute is that even with a ~90% standard, we have a small but "never give up, never surrender" contingent who argue at every turn that a "pretty high" capitalization rate ought to be sufficient to require WP to capitalize. If the cutoff were moved down to ~60%, their argument would not change in any way, because it is not based in any way on dominance of capitalization in sources; they would simply argue that, say, 20% is "pretty high" and should be sufficent, because their goal isn't agreeing with source usage, it's getting capitalization no matter what on something they peresonally feel "must be" a proper name for signficance/importance arguments from philosophy (and it's not even the principal angle of philosophy definitions of proper name, but one that most philosophy approaches rejected a long time ago; it's confused armchair philosophy).

On the more general matters: "lowercasing what appear to be proper names confounds some of us": This is utterly unavoidable, because of conflicting definitions of "proper name" (summarized at WP:PNPN) that don't even relate to writing style. This is much of the reason we have an objective standard in the first place, since editors will never agree on a "proper name" definition. Regardless, it is better to confound a small number of individuals who have latched onto a particular philosophy definition of "proper name" that has nothing to do with orthography, than to confound a vastly larger readership who intuit the linguistic sense (a proper name for spelling purposes is a name that is conventionally, i.e. near-universally, capitalized). Or, in a more typical thought pattern, reading our material with no intrusive thoughts about style at all, versus having their parsing interrupted with "This looks weird to me because it's capitalizing something that is usually lowercase. Why? Is this some special meaning of this string of characters I don't know about? Is this a trademark, an organization name, the title of a work? What the hell is being signaled at me here?".

The central problem is that seems "important" enough to uppercase is entirely subjective, has caused nothing but stife, and is an approach rejected by consensus (thus the lead rule of MOS:CAPS and the entire section MOS:SIGCAPS), in favor of only capitalizing on the basis of consistent RS usage. "Important" just doesn't work because no one agrees on a definition of it, or anything approximating it. WP's long road to developing the WP:Notability standard ran into this problem for years, and also had to abandon "importance" (in various flavors including "significance", "popularity", etc. – cf. WP:Notability/Historical), in favor of an objective level-of-sourcing approach. It's also why attempts to develop a policy or guideline against "trivia" any more specific than WP:NOT#INDISCRIMINATE have repeatedly failed. This is not intrinsically a style issue at all, but a project-wide practicality matter.

Even if something seemed important enough to some topically focused editors to use signfication capitals in an article on that subject (subjectively and against the opinion of other topically-focused editors and most editors not focused on that topic), the very same thing would not be important in another context, like the average biographical article of someone whose life intersected with that topic, so the result would be inconsistent capitalization of the same thing from page to page, and constant fighting about whether and when to capitalize it. It would also produce OR results counter to real-world practice, an imposition of a "Wikipedia style" of capitalizing things on the basis of editors' personal opinions of importance instead of on real-world norms, communication clarity needs with regard to readers, MW technical requirements, and other more objectively definiable considerations. The community has already actually been through all this, multiple times, in the early years when there was not a clear capitalization standard.

Common sense is not actually common, and on WP refers specifically to treating rules non-robotically so that our resulting material is good for the readers, rather than bad for them but technically compliant with a too-narrow rule (or, conversely, bad for them because it's avoiding rules entirely and being written in a way that suits someone's personal whim). When the sources don't substantially agree to capitalize something, it cannot be common sense to capitalize it here (absent some non-subjective rationale, e.g. WP:CONSISTENT in a few cases like "Earth"). WP:COMMONSENSE doesn't mean "what an editor thinks is common-sensical with regard to style", it means "what the community comes to agree is common-sensical with regard to a particular application of a rule". The existence of a shortcut named "WP:COMMONSENSE" doesn't mean "any interpretation I have of 'common sense' must be applicable on WP"; the actual wording of the policy is what matters.

WP defaults to lowercase for multiple reasons and some "IAR" argument (almost always subjective/PoV) rarely overcomes very many of them: WP did not invent the idea of defaulting to lowercase, and is following the majority of mainstream style guides (i.e., this is how modern English, in a non-informal register, actually operates); unnecessary capitalization negatively affects readability[3]; it confuses readers into thinking a generic common-noun usage is something with a proper name (sometimes one with a different conventional or intuited referent than what the actual subject is); the very notion of capitalizing things to try to signify importance, age, popularity, size, influence-level, or some other sense of "significance" is by its nature a PoV-pushing exercise; the signification generally fails anyway, since most English-language readers do not use capitalization as serving this function, outside of advertising and a few other genres, and even if they coincidentally happen to be a "sig-capper" in their own writing habits, they have no idea what is being signified in a particular instance unless they are already a subject-matter expert; doesn't agree with most RS usage; causes unnecessary editorial conflict; confuses incoming editors into thinking that capitalizing entire categories of things (terms for vehicles, genres or styles of anything, common names of plants and animals, etc.) is "Wikipedia style", followed by well-meaning but disruptive attempts to wrongly impose it across thousands of articles; if virtualy everything is "important" in some particular context, and importance were considered grounds for capitalization, then virtually everything (noun or noun-phrase, anyway) would be capitalized, a habit that died in English around the end of the 18th century; sig-caps even among its fans is applied remarkably inconsistently (e.g. fans of capitalizing common names of [sub]species like "Bottle-nosed Dolphin" and "Mountain Gorilla" balked when this idea was experimentally applied to more common names like "Dog" and "Lion" and "Human"; they had not thought through the implications of what they were asking for); and several other reasons.

A key line at WP:COMMONSENSE is Similarly, just because something is not forbidden ... or is even explicitly permitted, doesn't mean it's a good idea in the given situation. This has important implications for the fact that the MOS:CAPS "capitalized consistently in a substantial majority of independent reliable sources" standard allows but does not demand that something be capitalized.

all "sides" have enough sources and adequate reasonings to allow room at such RMs for heated ... disagreements: Except our objective sourcing-ratio standard is specifically designed to stop this. Heated disagreements over tedious style trivia are corrosive and the entire community is sick to death of them. Each of the sides do not have sufficient sourcing in the cases you mention, or consistent capitalization in sources would have been easily provable and the RMs would have gone for uppercase. Virtually never is any other reasoning going to be "adequate", because it is almost always subjective opinion based on the philosophy stuff covered at WP:PNPN, or on WP:SSF writing habits, and neither of them are rationales for how to write in a general-audience encyclopedia. The fact that a small number editors have a difference of opinion (along entrenched "capitalize to signify importance" lines) against policy and guidelines on article titles and their style doesn't invalidate those P&G, especially when RM and related consensus discussion consistently go against those holdouts' wishes, repeatedly rejecting their arguments, and they do not present new arguments but endlessly recycle the already-refuted ones, as if they think that lucking into a few "victories" by the accident of who showed up at RM that day will somehow turn the overall WP-defaults-to-lowercase tide. It's not going to happen, and all it does is waste editorial time and make more and more editors frustrated.

That's not to suggest that every single time someone wants to lowercase something they are in the right; our most active case-cleanup editor, Dicklyon, proposes moves from time to time that are wrongheaded. But it's not ever because someone has a philosophical importance argument to recycle; it is always and only because the aggregate-usage-in-sources numbers actually show a very high capitalization rate (usually because he's mixed in a proper-named subject into a mass-RM of common-noun-phrase subjects by accident due to similarly structured article titles).

I have no idea whether any of these arguments are convincing to you in any way, but they're among the ones and I others will make, with regard to "IAR for common sense because this subject is so important" suggestions, or a proposal to drastically change the MOS:CAPS standard to "even a slight majority". I apologize for this being even longer than before, but there are so many points to consider and explore.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  22:17, 27 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

SMcCandlish, this is a ridiculous and indulgent amount of text. You don't really expect people to read it, do you? Ceoil (talk) 00:25, 28 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks Ceoil, but yes, I'll be happy to read his last post, but not now. An interesting discussion before that. Probably will read it tomorrow, after some regular-habit editing, and maybe breakfast, or maybe the next day (no hurry), and look forward to doing so. Randy Kryn (talk) 02:52, 28 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

It is a lot (and there's no deadline or requirement to read it), because there is a tremendous amount to cover due to the interplay of numerous policies, guidelines, practices, hypothesis, patterns, rationales, etc. This is not some RfC post for the public, it's an attempt to have the e-quivalent of an exploratory one-on-one conversation with someone in lieu of several more years of short-form sniping back and forth at RMs, where both sides' arguments are apt to be misunderstood or just ignored by the other. It's worth a few hours of writing and reading if it produces a better long-term meeting of minds and fewer hours of argument over the long haul (or it obviates something worse, like eventual drama-board conflict that might take days or weeks and be orders of magnitude more stressful).  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  19:25, 28 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Still haven't gotten to it, and thanks for your understanding note, I'll wait awhile amidst other editing while I'm online. I am confused by the drama board mention at the end of your note. On my part I have no intention to drama-board anything, you can keep insulting me sometimes at discussions and I'm fine with that. Drama board things seem to evolve sometimes into shark feeding, and some relatively innocent victims have been thrown into the volcano (sharks in a volcano? that'd be cool in a film) so those are not something I instigate. If you meant that my occasionally bringing up the perfectly legitimate and Wikipedia-treasured policy, WP:IAR, in discussions is somehow drama board worthy, be assured that my citing it as an opinion has always been ignored. Has any closer ever used or accepted IAR in their close? I hope so, the thing is policy, but I actually don't know. Of course am now more interested in reading your post, kind of like fine wine (I don't drink wine, but you get the idea), when I can give it the time and attention it needs. Randy Kryn (talk) 23:59, 28 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Read it, and a well-written, although longish, post. Thanks for your points about a possible change to 60% casing likely causing more arguments than the present standard, that makes sense. Percentages seem objective until they aren't, such as the military title which showed overwhelming n-gram support for uppercase yet was likely correctly downcased, showing that exceptions to the rules exist. Along those lines, I've read editors enthusiastically take both sides on different RMs within the same week. The correctness of most casing RMs seem instantly obvious, yet their abundance (and often overreach) too often throws everyone who keeps track of them into the familiar maelstrom and habitual taking of group sides.

As for commonsense, either overused or underused. Kind of a "you know it when you see it" factor which is valuable to keep in Wikipedia's toolbox. It's a shortcut way of expressing a point of view that may or may not be apparent to everyone, and as individual-centric logic, it isn't meant to be. Some of its usefulness comes from those aha! moments when an until-then unique viewpoint actually makes sense to others. Maybe few and far etc. but valuable in its own way, and shouldn't be seen as a negative in discussions but just a window into another editors thinking.

As for the importance of "a thing", such as disagreeing about the proper names of tectonic plates and why n-grams often don't tell the story, if vigorous debate occurs it should be accepted as a normal give-and-take and not criticized. To change an over 20-year acceptance of uppercasing of, say, North American Plate, even though uppercasing has been accepted as a proper name form by Britannica, geologists, and many other sources, doesn't seem controversial. It could be called controversial and lockstep if there were no opposition. Wikipedia changing the casing of the largest named structures on Earth is literally a "big" deal, and much of the opposition to the change came from far outside of the usual suspects. Following-up on that particular RM seems both logical and necessary, and a full follow-up can give it an airing outside of those who found one of its RM alerts (many move reviews end up in yet another scrum which, by the very nature of a review, don't seem controversial although time-consuming, and should be balanced with a chance of success and not just an exercise in right-wrong). I should ping you SMcCandlish to alert you of a response. I'd like to ping Martinevans123 too, since we need more wit with our width. Randy Kryn (talk) 12:10, 29 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Woo. Anyone know what's a cross between a tempting cup and a wall of burning text?? Martinevans123 (talk) 13:19, 29 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Potter knows. Randy Kryn (talk) 13:24, 29 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Glad it wasn't too much to get through. From here I'll try to just respond to your own specific points. I am confused by the drama board mention at the end of your note. I don't mean to imply any kind of plan (especially since I'm stress-averse); just that long-term editorial conflict that does not improve tends to end up at noticeboards, sometimes dragged there by third parties. Percentages seem objective until they aren't, such as the military title which showed overwhelming n-gram support for uppercase yet was likely correctly downcased, showing that exceptions to the rules exist. Well, that wasn't a rule exception, it was a matter of questionable evidence being supplemented with additional evidence. There's no rule that names have to agree with ngrams or particular ngrams; ngrams are simply one form of evidence of usage that's often but not always helpful. More often than not, ngrams show a consistent usage pattern over time, with a pretty smooth curve of change, if any. When one shows a sudden radical usage change in the sources behind the ngram, not long after WP introduced (or renamed) an article on the subject, we know what's going on.

The correctness of most casing RMs seem instantly obvious, yet their abundance (and often overreach) too often throws everyone who keeps track of them into the familiar maelstrom and habitual taking of group sides. Definitely a major factor (or pair of them). It's a vicious cycle. Most case-related moves should inspire no debate, since the rule is actually quite simple. But ingrained subjective preferences plsu animosities arising from previous debates and an occasional mis-listing have inspired various RM participants to become regulars who eagle-eye for case changes and generate ideosyncractic controversy. A WP:GNOME editor doing capitalization cleanup is not the most productive thing, and is probably irritating to some subset of editors because style matters are mostly trivial, but it's not in itself "a wrong" or categorically unproductive (unlike fighting against application of MOS, AT, and RS to a particular topic). Demands for virtually every such renaming to now be done through full RM process is the cause of so many case RMs (formerly just moved manually, with occasional reversion requests at WP:RM/TR). It really should be trivial maintenance no one cares about (like correcting category names in articles after a CfR), but it's not because style matters generate emotional responses arising from an individual sense of what is most "proper". The average person has an intensely prescriptive sense about language usage matters as "right or wrong", usually internalized from around middle-school age (along with confused ideas about what "proper name" means), but sometimes rewritten by immersion in a particular field.

It's not that there are too many casing moves, its that there is too much emotion about them, which goes up the more casing move debates there are (yet those most upset about these debates are those who keep demanding more debates). No one really wants them to happen other than those opposed to lowercasing things they sometimes see capitalized. So, for the familiar maelstrom and habitual taking of group sides: the sides are not equal-but-opposite; in capitalization, one side almost always has P&G and source-usage behind it, while the other has personal (or sometimes specialist) preference. That a maelstrom (i.e. long-term disruption) exists is an entirely one-sided problem, rooted in emotive preference that has nothing to do with consistent usage in RS. Really, this is a matter of a small but vocal contigent not being happy that WP has a source-based capitalization spec, but being unable to get consensus to change it, they are seeking a "slow-movewar" WP:FAITACCOMPLI false consensus by wearing out opposition through RM process-wonkery. The thinking seems to be "If we can get what we want 10% of the time, that will be enough to turn the tide." But it will not; it never is on any matter here.

WP:COMMONSENSE as a shortcut way of expressing a point of view that may or may not be apparent to everyone: I don't disagree with that at all, but don't observe that being how it is usually cited in these casing discussions. It is istead often presented as a PoV wedge, an implication that one's preference must be accepted against P&G and evidence because it somehow "is" the most sensible outcome and everyone disagreeing is somehow being dense or nutty (and by implication the P&G are broken, and the sources are either bad or are being lied about). Much of that was in play in the football drafts RfC.

Wikipedia changing the casing of the largest named structures on Earth is literally a "big" deal: But the tectonic plates are not the largest structures on earth; already earlier went over how they are part of the mantle, in turn part of the lithosphere, and those aren't capitalized either (and no one cares). Nothing like this is ever a "big deal" to anyone unless they are attempting to use capitalization to signify contextual importance, which WP doesn't do. Various people are habituated to that practice in their own writing and are resistant to WP not doing it, so it was no surprise that some showed up to make signficance-based philosophical arguments. They weren't more effective than or even different from those previously rejected in endless prior RMs, because the capitalization rate in RS is low, and that is the question being asked.

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[Aside: Those who want more capitalization are !voting against their own interests when they argue WP must care why something is or "should" be capitalized (along imporance/signficance/scope lines) instead of depending on largely-consistent capitalization in RS: Besides being a subjective OR and perpetual-debate farm, it would result in lower-casing tens of thousands of presently capitalized things, against consistent source usage, because no reason for the capitalization would be reliably sourceable, or capitalizating it even is against the philsophy sense of proper names these editors want to rely on (starting with most military conflicts and everything else with a name that is descriptive in form). As with "force full RM if capitalization is involved", the pro-caps camp would be cutting off their own noses to spite their faces.]

Move review: I suspect from what you wrote (e.g. yet another scrum ... balanced with a chance of success and not just an exercise in right-wrong) that you envision MR as a means to relitigate the arguments in an RM, and introduce new ones, with a different audience. But it is not; its only purpose is determining if the closer provably erred in assessing the consensus as it stood in the original discussion, with the arguments and evidence presented there. I.e., it is strictly a right–wrong affair, but about one person's judgment, not about the content question.

I have no objection to Martinevans123 or others with an interest getting involved in this, especially since its your talk page. But it would probably be sensible to start a new heading, and approach specific questions, instead of dragging out this "general overview" approach further; it was perhaps unmanageable in scope from the outset (mea culpa).
 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  21:25, 29 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks, hopefully I'll read it tomorrow. Randy Kryn (talk) 01:39, 30 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Following up on your edit to Into the Light (Marisa Anderson album) because, to be frank, I didn't understand at all what your edit summary meant. WP:NOTBROKEN doesn't appear to refer to anything similar to what you're describing, and you didn't link any guidelines in either your initial edit or your redo. You call it a "mis-link", but again, it goes to the exact same place; I see no "mis" here. And you mention that you intend to "clear the project"; what project? NOTBROKEN seems quite clear to me on the matter, but otherwise I'm lost here. If you don't mind, a bit more clarification would be appreciated. QuietHere (talk | contributions) 23:55, 1 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Hello QuietHere. To explain in different words: to make it easier to do an uppercase run of the proper name Sonoran Desert I am working from this list of lowercased and Wikipedia linked 'Sonoran desert'. This "checks off the list" the pages which include the lowercase, often done when a direct quote uses the lowercasing. This removes the page from the yet-to-be-done list (see link above). Removing the lowercased link (by adding the correct direct link) also helps the next editor who does this uppercase run. Make sense? Randy Kryn (talk) 00:35, 2 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Not remotely, no. What is an uppercase run? Is there something wrong with the capitalization of either Sonoran Desert or Sonoran desert? QuietHere (talk | contributions) 00:42, 2 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, the uppercase Sonoran Desert is the name of the article. A casing run fixes all the lowercased links on Wikipedia where 'Sonoran desert' is used and, when fixed, the correct title is shown in visible space. Randy Kryn (talk) 00:48, 2 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Well 1. that's not a fix if it's a direct quote, just a preference, and 2. you added a piped link so there is no visible difference. QuietHere (talk | contributions) 00:51, 2 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

The purpose is to remove the page from the list being worked. In many cases the list includes several hundred pages, and if one of those keeps being returned it just wastes time to look for the error and redoing the fix. Maybe assume I made the edit in good faith, especially after explaining it several times (even if you don't understand it). Thanks. Randy Kryn (talk) 00:59, 2 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I never didn't assume good faith, and I'm not undoing it or anything. I just don't get the purpose of it and your explanations are getting me closer (I think) but I'm not quite there. I apologize for taking up your time. Hopefully this is my last question: when you say "error", are you referring just to the difference between Sonoran desert and Sonoran Desert, or is there something else at work here that needs fixing? QuietHere (talk | contributions) 01:27, 2 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks. No, nothing else, just fixing the links to direct links (the uppercased title) and clearing the list so that the next person who comes along to fix the casing doesn't have to go through the process of looking for the lowercase in the text only to find out that it is appropriately used. Randy Kryn (talk) 01:31, 2 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Okay, I get it now. Thank you. QuietHere (talk | contributions) 01:34, 2 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks, appreciated. Randy Kryn (talk) 01:35, 2 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]