User talk:Chernorizets

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–Tommy Kronkvist (talk), 23:59, 19 November 2023 (UTC).

@Tommy Kronkvist thank you! Chernorizets (talk) 00:06, 20 November 2023 (UTC)

Whether to capitalize plant names or not

Hello again. Regarding vernacular names ("VN") and your question whether to capitalize (Bulgarian) vernacular names or not, we haven't really reached consensus. It's been up for discussion several times over the years – we've even had a poll about it – but as of yet we haven't been able to enact a proper guideline. I think that most users prefer using leading caps (that's also reflected in the poll results), but it's not considered a huge deal if a user choose to go all lower case instead. There's an exception for English vernacular names, which should be capitalized in accord with most other formal publications, as well as for German vernacular names (since all nouns are always capitalized in German).

While on the subject, one thing we do have a guideline about is that in order to avoid the list becoming too long, we should only include one vernacular name per language. This may seem a bit strange, but 1) vernacular names very rarely add any information about taxonomy (so in all honesty they're actually out of Wikispecies' scope) and 2. in some languages there are literally hundreds of vernacular names for some species, which would overwhelm our taxon pages. Please read the "Usage" section of our Vernacular names section guideline for more information.

As always you're very welcome to ask any question or contribute with your ideas and proposals. Happy editing! Tommy Kronkvist (talk), 04:27, 20 November 2023 (UTC).

@Tommy Kronkvist thanks for the context, and the note about the number of vernacular names. I'll edit my latest contribution to keep the name that appears to be more common.

Coming from Wiktionary, which is case-sensitive, we have entries with both lowercase and uppercase leading letters. Generally, we follow the capitalization rules of individual languages - e.g. German nouns are capitalized, whereas most English nouns aren't. Even within a language, capitalization may change meaning - e.g. in English, Hamburger might be a family name, whereas "hamburger" is the (related) word for a type of sandwich. In Bulgarian, names of individual animal and plant species are normally written with a lowercase leading letter, whereas names of taxonomic units - families, orders, genera - are normally capitalized. All that said, given that Wikispecies is not a dictionary, I'm happy to go with whatever the prevailing wisdom is.

Thanks,

Chernorizets (talk) 04:37, 20 November 2023 (UTC)

You're welcome. I was born in Finland (went to school there for a few years), but Swedish is my mother tongue and I've lived in Sweden for almost all my life. In Swedish we almost never use uppercase leading letters, except of course when starting a new sentence and for (most) proper nouns such as names of persons, cities, corporations etc. Hence, we always use lower case not only for species, but for names of orders and genera as well. The same goes for instance for names of weekdays and months: they're never capitalized, in contrast to in English.

Thanks for re-editing the Helichrysum arenarium page. Over and out, for now. Tommy Kronkvist (talk), 05:22, 20 November 2023 (UTC).