Wikipedia talk:Citing sources

The following discussion is an archived record of a request for comment. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this discussion. A summary of the conclusions reached follows.

Is consistently using the capitalization used by sources (except for all-caps titles) considered an acceptable reference formatting style? WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:27, 1 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

• No. "Matthew Stafford Voted Comeback Player Of The Year By PFW/PFWA" is leading case. "League's 1st championship game, draft highlight NFL in 1930s" is sentence case. "1976 Detroit Lions Rosters, Stats, Schedule, Team Draftees" is title case. Putting all three of these capitalization styles into the same article would not be "a consistent style" within the meaning of WP:CITESTYLE. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:28, 1 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • I want to add: The most important thing about citation formatting is that you do your best to identify the source. That has been a key point in the lead of this guideline for many years. So what this really means is: If you copy/paste from the sources or use a ref filling tool (which most of us do), and someone else decides to WP:VOLUNTEER their time to capitalize all the titles one way or the other, you shouldn't revert them back to a mishmash of styles. But if you don't think capitalization is all that important, then IMO you are still free to focus on the things you believe are important, and leave the capitalization question to people who care about it. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:33, 1 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

    Instead of running around and changing the style it sounds like that's something that should be discussed on a case by case basis, as we would normally do when changing the style of citations in an article. Many people, myself included, prefer to preserve the capitalization used by sources, keeping a source to reference integrity in a sense. Additionally, how do you deem what the better style is? All sentence case? All title case? Either way, it's something that would be discussed on a per case basis instead of something that should be mass changed across articles. Hey man im josh (talk) 17:36, 1 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

    Some readers find inconsistent capitalization in footnotes on the same article looks sloppy or jarring or unpleasant. If "retain the capitalization of each source" is banned as a "consistent" style because of that sort of objection, the style that each article adopts would be controlled by WP:CITEVAR. Which mostly means, whichever style arrives first, if one is not already dominant. There is no need for a source-by-source or article-by-article discussion, unless an editor wants to change an established style to a different one - for example if a specific style is common in the field the article is describing. -- Beland (talk) 19:28, 29 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

    Have we really gotten feedback from readers (non-editors) about reference capitalization or is it just folks here that are fretting? —A. B. ^{(talk • contribs • global count)} 18:34, 16 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

    Editors are the readers who care enough to complain and to try to fix what they perceive as broken. If something bothers them, I think it's fair to assume it also bothers readers who don't complain.

    It is a fair question though, what fraction of readers notice visually inconsistent capitalization or are bothered by it. Though intellectually I know professional style guides do not follow the sources, when I look at an article I don't much notice capitalization variants in the footnotes unless it's all caps or otherwise obviously non-standard (like capitalizing the second letter or something). There's always a mix of title case and sentence case because there's a mix of types of work, and it takes some effort to figure out if there is a mismatch between work type and case choice. So though I voted "no" in the RFC, "yes" is probably fine in practice, certainly for a decade or two while we fix many other problems with referencing. -- Beland (talk) 20:05, 16 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  With apologies to WAID (I'm not trying to nitpick), the title case in your example should read: "Matthew Stafford Voted Comeback Player of the Year by PFW/PFWA". Boghog (talk) 18:54, 1 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  Leading case upcases every word, not just the ones your (and my) English teacher approved of.

  Those three examples were all taken from a real article. Josh's claim is that since the source – https://www.prideofdetroit.com/2012/1/16/2712497/matthew-stafford-pfw-pfwa-awards – has chosen a headline style that upcases every word in their headlines, then the Wikipedia article should upcase every word in the title for that source (and use ordinary title case if the source uses title case, or sentence case if the source uses sentence case, etc.). @Dicklyon made the corrections you suggest, and Josh reverted them, saying that having a mismatched capitalization scheme is consistent, because they're consistent with the various sources. That dispute is why we're here.

  NB that the question at hand isn't whether using leading case for every single citation in an article would be an abomination. It's whether "consistent" means that whatever case scheme you choose has to be used in all of them, or if visually mismatched capitalization, if consistently taken from the individual sources, is consistent in its own way. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:07, 1 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  @Boghog: It was my correction of that citation title to title case as you suggest that got reverted and started this discussion. To me, all those capitalized little pronouns just look so out of place on Wikipedia that I hard a hard time imagining that someone would fight for them, but here we are. Dicklyon (talk) 23:16, 1 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  And to me forcing our personal preferences is just straight up wrong. But I don't try to stand in the way of others applying a consistent style (which you did not do with your edit, changing it away from consistency). Hey man im josh (talk) 23:44, 1 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  I don't see anyone forcing anything. You're right that I didn't move that article's citation style to a consistent style; I only fixed what looked like a glaring outlier, as I was not aware that anyone thought it would be OK the way it was. You objected, so now we're trying to get a better idea how to interpret the idea of a consistent style. Dicklyon (talk) 02:14, 2 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  It is forcing a specific style, it's taking away the option to preserve the titles of works and articles when promoting content. Many of us believe it's important to preserve the title of the work's capitalization, instead of having people change it based on what they like. It's also creating a lot more work for those who are promoting content. Hey man im josh (talk) 15:52, 8 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

• Yes: Consistently using the capitalization used by sources (aside from an all capitalized word) is clearly appropriate. If we decide that it's not, then it sounds like our citation tools need to be changed to reflect this, since that's what they do. Hey man im josh (talk) 17:32, 1 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  Realistically, this discussion is about whether only title and sentence case are acceptable for reference titles. We explicitly do not have a defined allowable citation style. This will create insane amounts of busy work that does nothing to improve the site, will result in countless additional fights over whether specific terms should be capitalized, restricts editors' freedom, and will only do more to harm the integration of new editors. For what? Because people like certain things and don't like the style others choose to apply consistently? There's plenty of styles I don't like which I recognize as being okay and acceptable. I stand on the side of logic, and what best allows Wikipedia to continue to grow and be improved upon. If we keep forcing ridiculous nitpicky rules like this it just adds more barriers and rules for people to get involved and contribute. Hey man im josh (talk) 23:42, 1 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  Also asking, what makes this a not consistent style, if the style is applied consistently? Keep in mind this is WP:NOTAVOTE, and I've personally not been convinced this does anything to improve the site. Truth be told, it makes me more likely to go back to gnoming instead of content. Hey man im josh (talk) 15:25, 4 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  What makes a quasi-random collection of styles imported willy-nilly from sources with divergent styles not be consistent is: It doesn't look consistent to the reader of the Wikipedia article.

  Compare "My clothes match because they are all the same color" vs "My clothes match because they were all bought on the same day". There is an underlying logic to the second one, but that logic is not visible to someone who is looking at a person wearing a pink shirt, a blue jacket, brown trousers, a black belt and white shoes. Someone looking at a person dressed that way would think "Wow, he's wearing mismatched clothes today. I wonder if he's color blind". Someone looking at such a person would not think "I'm sure that's totally consistent and everything matches according to some perfectly logical system that just isn't apparent to me". WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:48, 5 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  It doesn't matter what looks consistent, it matters what is consistent. There are plenty of styles that I don't personally like the looks of, but I recognize are applied consistently. I've learned about a lot of different styles while doing source reviews at content promotion avenues.

  As for your example, someone's personal style, which is subjective, is your argument here? There are so many things that people would say are a consistent look but look awful. For instance, head to toe camo, I don't think that looks good, but a lot of people may, and it doesn't mean it's not consistent. Additionally, what you perceive as matching colours may not be perceived as such by others in the world, as I've learned from some of the people in my life who have told me things don't match. Hey man im josh (talk) 15:50, 8 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  It's not about whether it "looks awful"; it's about whether it matches. You can have mismatched capitalization, but you can't call it matching. You can wear mismatched color combinations, but you can't call it matching. This is a matter of "you are entitled to your own opinions, but not to your own facts". The fact is that using mismatched capitalization schemes for the different sources listed in the ==References== section is not "consistent" because it's mismatched. It might have many other virtues, but using a visibly consistent style is not one of them. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:31, 15 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  I can and do call it matching. What one perceives as matching does not have to fit what others perceive as such. I also absolute consider it consistent to respect and use the same capitalization used by the title of the work being cited, but I also respect your right to disagree. Hey man im josh (talk) 11:46, 15 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

• No. No printed style manual I've ever seen recommends importing style decisions of a cited source into an article one is writing, on a source-by-source basis. One always chooses a citation stye for one's article and sticks to it. It is only within direct quotes where one defers, to some extent, to the style of the source. Jc3s5h (talk) 17:35, 1 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
• I think the section title should be changed to "RFC on whether using capitalizations from sources is a consistent reference style". It's more direct and straight forward. The current title of this section implies this might be related to article capitalizations instead of reference capitalizations. Hey man im josh (talk) 17:39, 1 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  I don't want this confused with Wikipedia:Naming conventions (capitalization), about which there is a completely unrelated discussion open. But that's twelve words long, which is a bit much for a section heading. We're already at eight words, which is already on the long side of normal. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:09, 1 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

• Yes This is common practice, so at least it needs to be an acceptable option. As others have pointed out this is how citation tools import titles, very few editors are likely to care enough to change the titles in the articles they are creating. All that's not to say it should be encouraged or that something like the FA process can't require a more formal style. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 18:07, 1 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
• Yes No with the following clarification: The available options should be limited to "Sentence case" or "Title Case." Capitalizing every word should be discouraged. Boghog (talk) 18:38, 1 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  The options should not be limited to sentence case or title case. This isn't what respected published style guides do. As an example, IEEE Reference Style uses title case for book titles and names of journals, but sentence case for journal articles and chapters of books. Unfortunately, editors of Wikipedia articles almost never record what style is being used, so style must be deduced from existing citations. Jc3s5h (talk) 19:44, 1 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  You're right that different respected style guides, like IEEE, apply both sentence case and title case depending on context. However, I think that you misunderstood my original point. My suggestion isn't to require one style across all uses, but rather to clarify that the available options should be limited to sentence case or title case, not an arbitrary mixture that includes capitalizing every single word. This kind of inconsistent and nonstandard capitalization should be discouraged, as it doesn't follow any major style guideline. It is entirely reasonable to have both sentence case and title case within an article, just as IEEE does across different reference types. But each instance should conform to one of these recognized styles—not a third, ad hoc style. Boghog (talk) 20:35, 1 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  Agree. Jc3s5h (talk) 20:52, 1 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  Agreed: No, + options should probably be limited to title case or sentence case.

  An editor taking the time to fix a jarring source title (e.g., any of: I Think This Guy Is Player Of The Year, I THINK THIS GUY IS PLAYER OF THE YEAR, i think this guy is player of the year) ought be thanked, not reverted!

  Himaldrmann (talk) 15:43, 16 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

• YesNo(see below) if you feel that some form of consistency is required. I am not happy about imposing any such requirements on reference titles rather than just getting the complete information in there. I come from a field where references are unhelpfully abbreviated to Aller H. D. and Reynolds S. P. 1985 ApJL 293 L73. This RFC as worded seems to imply that the alternative will be to require changing book titles to War and peace and Little women to match journal titles in sentence case. Please be more specific. — Preceding unsigned comment added by StarryGrandma (talk • contribs) 18:58, 1 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  @StarryGrandma, the question is whether a Wikipedia article is allowed to combine multiple different capitalization styles. It's not whether to have "War and peace"; it's whether you can have both "War and peace" and "Little Women" in the same Wikipedia article.

  The three examples I gave in my comment above are all taken from the same Wikipedia article. One editor tried to "fix" one of them. Another editor wants those three examples left untouched, because they're already perfect as they stand. Which approach do you think is appropriate? WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:14, 1 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  It's not combining capitalization styles. The style is preserving the proper title used by the source. Hey man im josh (talk) 23:12, 1 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  It is combining capitalization styles, in the sense that the articles ends up containing multiple capitalization styles in it: leading caps for the one ref's title, title case for the next, and so forth. All of these styles are combined ("intermixed", to give the definition from Merriam-Webster) in the Wikipedia article.

  The opposite of combining capitalization styles is requiring that only one (1) capitalization style be visible to readers of the article: the Wikipedia editors choose title case or sentence case or leading caps or (*shudder*) even all caps, but every news article cited in the Wikipedia article gets the same approach to capitalization. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:46, 2 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  @WhatamIdoing, I believe this page is a guideline. By "allowed" are we talking about an RFC on policy. However I sympathize with the problems caused when some editors want it some way and some another. And I will grant that book titles are already covered by the section of the MOS, Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Titles of works#Capital letters, stipulating that "major works" in English use title case and so won't be affected by choices for journal articles, newspaper articles, or chapter titles. And on further reading of that section I see it seems to cover the issues here.

  I would rather see titles as published, because it simplifies creating references. However the same section says: WP:Citing sources § Citation style permits the use of other citation styles within Wikipedia, and some of these expect sentence case for certain titles (usually article and chapter titles). Title case should not be imposed on such titles under such a citation style consistently used in an article. I interpret this to mean that the guideline is saying editors at each article can decide whether the article's citation style uses sentence case or title case for "minor works" like journal article, chapter titles, etc. And probably means the issue is subject to WP:CITEVAR, follow the first major contributor. The section also contains the specifications for Wikipedia's own version of title case to be used in converting a sentence case title to title case. We do have a house style for this and are not dependent on external style guides.

  As to leading case, the section says Other styles exist with regard to prepositions, including three- or even two-letter rules in news and entertainment journalism, and many academic publishers call for capitalization of no prepositions at all. These styles are not used on Wikipedia, including for titles of pop-culture or academic works I interpret that as emphasizing that the choice is between Wikipeida's title case or sentence case, not title as published. So capitalizing all words in a title is against the guideline.

  So I guess the answer to the question at the top of the RFC is No, the current guidelines say this is not acceptable. Sadly. Though I think we can avoid having infobox-type arguments over, how to format reference titles. StarryGrandma (talk) 01:12, 2 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  Do you think it would be desirable for WP:FAs to have the title of one newspaper article written in sentence case, and the title of the next newspaper article written in Title Case?

  I'm having trouble understanding why picking one capitalization style for the whole Wikipedia article is something we should view with sadness. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:35, 2 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  I come from a field that capitalizes article titles. I would hate to have to reduce them to sentence case when adding them to an existing article. This RFC isn't about featured articles, its about guidelines for citing sources anywhere. References should be easy to add and the current tools are very helpful. But I have already changed my response to the RFC to No. The guidelines I quoted are pretty clear. An article can use sentence case for minor titles if the citation style is consistently used in the article. Using "should", not "must" but FAs follow "should". And titles with all words capitalized are not used in Wikipedia as a definite statement - "are not used". StarryGrandma (talk) 02:32, 2 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  I come from a field that capitalizes article titles. I would hate to have to reduce them to sentence case when adding them to an existing article. Why? The publisher is simply applying a style guide to their titles. I don't see a need to import theirs into ours in a piecemeal way. — HTGS (talk) 20:44, 2 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  @StarryGrandma: You asked about "allowed", a loaded word for sure. This RFC is about "acceptable", probably also not the best choice of word for a guidline. The question is really about whether the "style from sources" style is consistent with the guideline or not (and maybe about whether we should clarify the guideline if we come to a consensus on that question). Nobody is going to be chastised or punished for not following guidelines, but for gnomes like me that like to move things in directions supported by guidelines, it would be good know a consensus interpretation, to avoid arguments there and there. Dicklyon (talk) 02:10, 2 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  @Dicklyon, the "style from sources" is not consistent with the guidelines at Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Titles of works#Capital letters (MOS:TITLECAPS). The information on titles is scattered quite a bit, and I did not find it until I had initially said Yes above (now No). I think this page should refer editors to MOS:TITLECAPS for more information on titles as well as MOS:ALLCAPS. Or maybe one section somewhere should say it all. StarryGrandma (talk) 03:02, 2 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  Good work—it seems like this might already be covered by the guidelines, then?

  Himaldrmann (talk) 15:47, 16 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

• Yes. It is consistent to defer to the capitalisation as provided for in the thing being cited. Whether that is what should be done is a related but different issue; inasmuch as we're keeping the current thing that says consistent is acceptable that feels clear to me. Ifly6 (talk) 19:59, 1 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  I disagree. If we review several respected style guides, we see they require consistency throughout the work. See for example Chicago Manual of Style ¶ 2.55, 18th ed. But they also specify rules about capitalization of source titles that have nothing to do with how the source wrote the title. So your definition of consistent is just wrong. Jc3s5h (talk) 20:58, 1 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  That's the funny thing about personal definitions, to me yours is wrong. Preserving the capitalization used by the source is not actively harmful in any way, and to me is actually an active improvement over modifying all of the titles to fit whatever one's personal preference is. We also don't follow any one specific style guideline, so citing what one does isn't particularly relevant. Hey man im josh (talk) 23:16, 1 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  In a way it is consistent, in that it is a mechanistic rule that cam be followed by an algorithmic process, but is it reasonably practicable? The only reliable way to be sure what the source uses is to check the source. In a significant proportion of cases it is not reasonably possible for the average editor to check the source. This impractcability makes this option unsuitable for Wikipedia, without even considering other stylistic and aesthetic aspects. · · · Peter Southwood ^(talk): 06:41, 15 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

• No (where by not acceptable we mean not aligned with guidelines, therefore up for improvement). The guideline page whose talk page hosts this RFC has in the lead "Each article should use one citation method or style throughout". The section WP:CITESTYLE further details what some consistent styles are, by referencing style guides. It says "nearly any consistent style may be used", but gives no hint that copying an inconsistent bunch of styles could be considered a consistent style. Furthermore, it is pretty much impossible for an editor to tell from looking at an article what style is being used in an article if it looks like a jumble of styles. In general, when there are strange outliers from the usual standards of reference title capitalization (sentence case and title case), I tend to fix those, in the direction of being consistent with most others in an article. This never makes the sources hard to identify, just as using any of the styles recommended in style guides does not. Dicklyon (talk) 23:12, 1 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  The guidelines simply state to be consistent, they do not state we must edit the reference titles to match what Wikipedia uses for capitalization.

As one example, the NFL and all 32 teams consistently capitalize "NFL Draft" and each event, treating the names of the events as proper names. Are we to then apply the style that we personally see fit? What happens when one person doesn't like it? Does it then become we MUST adhere to whatever Wikipedia uses for capitalization? It's forcing specific citation styles on people who are consistent in what they do, and for what? To create busy work that actively slows down improvement of the site for no gain?

The goal appears to be to force Wikipedians to use either sentence or title case specifically, when there are countless styles which are consistent and differ drastically. Hey man im josh (talk) 23:17, 1 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Countless styles of capitalization? So far, we've only found five:

1. Title case: On War and Peace: A Few Thoughts
2. Sentence case: On war and peace: A few thoughts
3. Leading caps: On War And Peace: A Few Thoughts
4. All caps: ON WAR AND PEACE: A FEW THOUGHTS
5. Library style: On war and peace : a few thoughts

WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:30, 2 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not sure I'd agree that sentence case means use sentence case for subtitles, too, but maybe it does; I hadn't heard of Library style, but that does look a lot like what I see from Library of Congress (minimal capitalization). I expect there's no precedent in Wikipedia for using either all caps or leading caps as a consistent ref style in Wikipedia; it would be quite contrary to our general practice of avoiding unnecessary capitalization. I doubt that anyone would complain if we said not to do leading caps generally. That's orthogonal to the present question though. Dicklyon (talk) 02:20, 2 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

The listed styles are visibly consistent. A reader can inspect a small sample and work out the pattern. A "style" that is not visibly consistent leaves the reader at a loss as to how to add another item consistent with the existing material. The likely consequence is that they just make a wild-assed guess, or use whatever capitalisation they like best, and the probability of achieving consistency by WAG is low, so there is a drift to inconsistency. This is about as good or bad as "do whatever" Cheers, · · · Peter Southwood ^(talk): 08:29, 22 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Wikipedia does have a house style on capitalization of titles including those used in citations at MOS:TITLECAPS, For subtitles see MOS:TITLECAPS#Subtitle. StarryGrandma (talk) 03:18, 2 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

This comment does not correctly summarize MOS:TITLECAPS. The phrase there is "In titles (including subtitles, if any) of English-language works (books, poems, songs, etc.), every word is capitalized except for the definite and indefinite articles, the short coordinating conjunctions, and any short prepositions. This is known as title case." But if you read the whole section yo see this means mentioning a title in a Wikipedia article, outside of the reference section. It also doesn't apply to titles of journal articles, although it does apply to the title of the journal. it goes on to say

WP:Citing sources § Citation style permits the use of other citation styles within Wikipedia, and some of these expect sentence case for certain titles (usually article and chapter titles). Title case should not be imposed on such titles under such a citation style consistently used in an article.

Jc3s5h (talk) 14:40, 2 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

• Yes (while fixing all-caps and isolated glaring outliers should be allowed and encouraged): Copying from the source is simple to do and it preserves the integrity of the source, and it is what happens from automatic tools. There have been several times when some question arises (usually in an RM discussion) about about someone's "Favorite Theory" or "Infamous Incident", leading me to take a look at the citations for evidence of what is in them, and I notice that many of them refer to the "Infamous Incident" in their headlines, but when I actually open a few of the links, I see that the citations are not accurately representing what the sources have in them. With a little sleuthing, I sometimes find that just a week or two (or 5 minutes) before suggesting to rename the page, someone has edited the page to change the capitalization of that one phrase in many cited headlines and quotes and the article body. I don't like it when I see they have altered the cited titles to support their agenda. I want to be able to see whether a source referred to the topic as Il bidone or Il Bidone or I clowns, or as the EDGE Group or the Edge Group or EDGE Foundation. I also tend to find that if I get an itch to clean up some citations, I find no lack of other, more useful things to do – like add and correct author names, correct the usage of the |publisher= parameter, add |url-access= indications to help readers avoid wasting their time, adding {{dead link}} tags, adding links to author articles, adding links to articles about the publications, merging duplicate citations to the same source, changing POLITICO and TIME to Politico and Time, adding publication dates, making the date format more consistent, and tagging or removing citations to low-quality promotional or biased sources. All of those things help the reader, while I've never noticed anyone being especially worried about establishing a consistent styling of the capitalization in the cited headlines. —⁠ ⁠BarrelProof (talk) 03:38, 2 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
• Yes - Accurately reflecting the casing of sources has been the de facto reference formatting style since Wikipedia began, which is why all of the citation tools that have accumulated over two decades follow it. --PresN 03:59, 2 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  That's completely and utterly wrong. Going into an article that has a consistent style (e.g. title case for major works like journals and book titles and sentence case for minor, like articles and chapters, one of the more common styles) and imposing instead the exact case-spellings used in the original sources, all written to completely different style guides or not at all (it's common enough to encounter things like "Across A Gulf Of Time" due to no-smarts content management systems that auto-capitalize after after space character) would be against WP:CITESTYLE by changing from a consistent style to random chaos.

  Various half-baked citation tools (many of which have not been updated in years and nearly all of which introduce at least one kind of citation template formatting error that we have to clean up latter), generally do nothing with case because their coders haven't figured out how to do it. It's very simple to create code to copy string X and reuse it verbatim, but quite challenging to create one that transforms particular strings, depending on their template-parameter destination, through a carefully crafted title-case rule (e.g. one following our MOS:5LETTER system and not some off-site variation (of which there are many). But it's a moot point anyway: The tail does not wag the dog – citation tools are to be written to conform to our citation needs (and abandoned if they will not be repaired to do so); we do not shape our guidelines or our practices to suit limitations of third-party tools.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  04:42, 2 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  Across A Gulf of Time or Across A Gulf Of Time? (Not that it's important, heh; just figured you may have meant to give the latter as an example—unless I've misunderstood!)

  Himaldrmann (talk) 15:52, 16 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  Yes, fixed. But odds are you can find examples capitalized like "Across A Gulf of Time" due to poorly coded scripts, anyway.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  19:12, 20 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  I disagree that all of the citation tools that have accumulated over two decades follow it: correctly applying sentence casing algorithmically to an article title is effectively impossible. BibTeX attempts this, but any long-term user will attest that it often requires quite a bit of escaping capitals ("DNA" becomes "dna" sometimes without escaping). Zotero, probably the most-used GUI reference management software, explicitly does not sentence-case its entries automatically, and its reference document on this topic explains that it's functionally impossible to translate from title to sentence case. Wikipedia's much-less-powerful citation tools could not be expected to do this and it should be on editors to ensure consistency when an article approaches featured content status. Dan Leonard (talk • contribs) 19:09, 24 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

• Absolutely not. This idea is completely counter to the entire purpose of WP:CITESTYLE and its WP:CITEVAR. This is the third time we've been over this already in the space of a few weeks.

  WP:STYLEVAR requires a consistent style of citations in output for readers. It has absolutely nothing to do with a particular person's WP:NOTGETTINGIT and WP:1AM weird notion of "consistent way of entering citations, by just copy-pasting them as found". It is entirely fine for someone to do that (no editor has to comply with any style guideline of any kind to add content and citations). What is not permissible is WP:STONEWALL editwarring against other editors normalizing such a person's chaotic input to conform to our guidelines. These guidelines require consistent presentation of citations to our readers, with no regard for whether editors are "consistent" in how they (individually or collectively) go about producing that result; there is of course no way for WP to magically determine from a distance whether someone is being consistent in their data gathering and entry practices, and no reason to care.

  The entire notion that "consistent/consistency" in this guideline could have anything to do with how an editor likes to handle text on their end is nonsensical, and aside from being an obvious WP:WIKILAWYER / WP:GAMING tactic, is a classic fallacy of equivocation: trying to change the clear meaning of a term on-the-fly to a contradictory one to try to get a cogently indefensible result that they desire for subjective reasons (mostly often convenience AKA laziness, but occasionally as with PresN's strange notions above some idea of "obeying" external publisher's style preferences, which is the exact opposite of why we have a style guide at all).  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  04:42, 2 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

• No – It must be permissible to correct a cited title like … Voted Comeback Player Of The Year By PFW/PFWA to … Voted Comeback Player of the Year by PFW/PFWA – preferrably in the context of a more substantial edit. -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 04:47, 2 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  Who determines what the "corrected" version of the title is though? Must we use what Wikipedia uses as the capitalization for articles, or cam we use what sources treat as a proper name? Hey man im josh (talk) 14:23, 2 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  It's determined by an editor who is cleaning up the article. Ideally the cleanup-editor owns at least one printed style guide. The procedure is to look through the citations to see if it's apparent which style is being followed. If no pattern is evident, the cleanup editor can do what they want as long as it's consistent. In case of disagreement it's discussed on the article talk page. Jc3s5h (talk) 14:46, 2 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  The problem with that idea is that Wikipedia's guidelines for capitalization very often do not match other guidelines. This is one step towards "Every capitalization used by titles must be used in references as well". Hey man im josh (talk) 19:33, 2 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  To be clear, I meant the first step would be to look through the talk page and see if there is a discussion. If not, look at the early versions in the edit history; if most of the book titles are title case and most of the journal and newspaper article titles are sentence case, then that's the style. If the styles are wildly inconsistent until a cleanup 8 months ago, go with the style in the 8-month-old cleanup. If the style has always been wildly inconsistent, right up to the current version, the cleanup editor can choose any consistent style. Jc3s5h (talk) 20:55, 2 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

• No – The only purpose of keeping capitalisation the same as the source is to help web searches when the source disappears. Luckily, most web search engines totally ignore capitalisation. And like all other aspects of references, we are not bound by the source's choice of ordering, date format, etc. Therefore capitalisation can be treated the same as font choice - ignore it totally. I have a strong preference to sentence case but can live with capitalising every major word (typically skipping "the", "and", etc). All-caps is the same as SHOUTING - which is the source's intent to grab your attention but I don't want references to MOLEST me. But I'm not too fussed if some of the references use sentence case and others capitalise every major word - as said above, that's just busy work and too onerous to demand on volunteer editors. And I doubt if the majority of our readers even notice.  Stepho  talk  05:46, 2 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  I expect that some of the automated citation-creation tools will grab a title that does not reflect the real title that's found when reading the work on paper or in a PDF. For example, I used the Cite tool in the Visual Editor and entered the ISBN for the The Chicago Manual of Style EIGHTEENTH EDITION (that's how it appears on the title page, the ISBN is 978-0-226-81797-2). The Cite tool rendered the title as The Chicago manual of style (Eighteenth edition ed.) Jc3s5h Jc3s5h (talk) 16:53, 2 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  Many web pages have sentence case in the HTML source but use CSS rules to display it as uppercase. So it displays as uppercase but copy/paste and scrapping tools see sentence case. This is also common for author files for web news articles.  Stepho  talk  23:46, 2 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

• No, per various above, including Whatamidoing and Jc3s5h. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 18:15, 2 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
• No. The title of any work as published is conforming to some style guide. It is not our job to import a dozen different style guides into our own. In saying that, it is quite "acceptable" to import citations quickly, via copying and pasting or other tools, and as BarrelProof has said, there are a multitude of other things to fix before capitalisation of citations. BUT, where someone has chosen to fix titles, this should be in one direction (towards a unified citation style) and not in a dozen different directions (towards every publication's unique style guide). We are our own publication, not merely an online depository, as many still seem to think. Following that philosophy, we should and do have our own style guide. — HTGS (talk) 20:56, 2 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
• No. I don't care much what capitalization rule is used, but adopting this as a rule would make it very tedious to verify and impose consistency. An automatically generated citation is fine as a starting point, but often needs improvement in many ways, not limited to capitalization. (I'm also puzzled by the arguments being put forward by proponents, which seem contradictory - if "correcting" source capitalization is an integrity problem, why is it not an integrity problem to change all-caps titles?) Nikkimaria (talk) 01:56, 3 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
• No CITEVAR, unfortunately, results in lower-quality citations than a proper style guide, but a key positive function of the guideline is resolving disputes. To cut short a debate about formatting any particular citation, we can say "Make it consistent." The borrowed capitalization interpretation subverts that benefit. It introduces several potential ways to string along or exacerbate a dispute. What if only one or even zero editors can access the source? What if two editors access the source in two different ways, and find two different styles used? What if the method to access the source does not make it clear what the original capitalization was? It's okay to ignore CITEVAR when the citation can be made more functional by maintaining consistency with the source rather than the other citations in an article. For example, having ISBNs formatted with different numbers of digits and hyphens could help a reader determine if they have the same copy of the book by seeing the same ISBN. You can argue that better aligns with WP:V. That doesn't apply to capitalization though. As another editor pointed out above, search engines ignore capitalization, so it doesn't help locate the source either. Rjjⁱⁱⁱ (talk) 03:03, 3 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
• No, per WhatamIdoing, Dicklyon, SMcCandlish, Nikkimaria, and others above. It would also be annoying and potentially discouraging if someone fixes the capitalization of cited works (e.g. by correcting overcapitalizations in title style) and then gets reverted despite doing what was arguably an improvement, if a minor one. Gawaon (talk) 07:32, 3 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  I find it discouraging to go against the actual title used by the source, and to actually have to fight about what should and shouldn't be capitalized. What I consider a proper name others may not, and I KNOW that fight will happen. Hey man im josh (talk) 15:35, 4 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  Another issue that hasn't been considered so far but that should be considered before this RfC closes it that a Yes outcome would be absolutely unworkable in practice since nobody will know any more whether citations use a consistent style. Consider an article with 50 references, some of them printed books and articles, the rest web articles. Some use Sentence case, some Title Case, and some All Words Are Capitalized Even Articles And Prepositions Style. Is that a consistent reference formatting style? Nobody can know without having clicked on all the web references and having manually verified the case form of the title, as well as having retrieved all the cited books from libraries and verified their title page or table of contents. Nobody will do that, of course. So nobody would know any more what's consistent and what isn't. Gawaon (talk) 15:05, 10 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  How on earth would a yes outcome be unworkable? That simply means not blindly changing capitalization, which is super easy and workable. Hey man im josh (talk) 17:57, 14 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  It could perhaps be made workable if articles could be tagged with a "Citation case copied from sources" tag, to distinguish from articles that use a more conventional capitalization style. But as it stands, there's no way to know without looking at most of the sources whether that's the intended style, and no way to know it's consistent with that intent without looking at all the sources. Dicklyon (talk) 18:15, 14 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  (edit conflict) I was about to say the same thing: Corresponding templates could be created such as {{Use capitalisation from sources in citations}}, {{Use title case in source citations}} and {{Use sentence case in source citations}}, similar to other templates we already use, like {{Use dmy dates}} and {{Use Oxford spelling}}. —⁠ ⁠BarrelProof (talk) 18:24, 14 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  It's already workable, just don't needlessly change citation cases. Hey man im josh (talk) 18:59, 14 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  If you and I are working to develop an article, and you add citations with capitalization matching the sources and I add citations in title case, that is inconsistent whether this closes as Yes or No, and one or the other would have to be changed either way. This RfC is not "let's decide not to care about capitalization at all"; it's only "which of those would have to change?".

  I fully understand that copying and pasting is easy from a just-get-a-reference-in perspective. But as a frequent source reviewer at FAC, I'd have to agree that from that perspective a Yes outcome is unworkable, or at least massively more tedious. And that's before we get into any additional complicating factors, for example different versions of a source having different capitalizations (eg accessing via a database vs directly from a publisher site). Nikkimaria (talk) 01:57, 15 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  A book's cover will be capitalized differently from its title page. A wire services article will appear with different capitalization in different newspapers. The HTML title property might use different capitalization than the displayed title. Which one is the One True™ Capitalization for that source? WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:40, 15 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  We should try to avoid tedious requirements where there is no clear benefit to the reader or the majority of editors. · · · Peter Southwood ^(talk): 07:04, 15 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  In addition to what Nikkimaria and WhatamIdoing said: The problem with a "Use capitalisation from sources in citations" template is that it still leaves editors clueless about which existing citations already comply with this style and which doesn't. Everyone who has edited more one very few articles will know that "Use DMY dates" doesn't mean that every existing date in the article already does so. It means that any existing date that deviates from this pattern should be adjusted to adhere to it, and very often that is indeed necessary, since less than 100% of all editors will read that note and follow what is says. Likewise "Use capitalisation from sources in citations" would only express an ideal, but which of the existing citations actually follow it is impossible to know without following up every single citation, which I have pointed out is entirely impractical, if not impossible in practice. That's the huge difference to "Use DMY/MDY dates" and hypothetical "Use title/sentence case in source citations" templates which can be easily verified by editors by just looking through the content of the page. And going beyond that is frankly not something we can and should expect editors to do. Gawaon (talk) 07:17, 16 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  The problem with needing manual checking of sources is broader than questions about capitalization. The primary way we know whether any information in citations is correct (and whether a provided URL is broken or not) is for people to go look at the sources and see what they have in them. Anyone who has bothered to do that kind of gnoming will know that there's no shortage of things needing checking and correction or addition of missing information in Wikipedia article citations. Yet we don't consider the practice of citing sources as generally unworkable. Indeed, it's a core principle. And automated tools (e.g. Wikipedia:reFill) seem to copy the capitalisation from the sources by default anyway, AFAIK. —⁠ ⁠BarrelProof (talk) 15:43, 16 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  There's a huge difference between editors collectively checking the sources of an article, and one individual editor being able to check all the sources of an article. Using "Date of Easter as an example, I was able to check some dates which the article implied came from Astronomical Algorithms 2nd ed., because I own that book. (It turned out the dates in question weren't in the book.) But if I wanted to check the capitalization of the title of Handbuch der mathematischen und technischen Chronologie I wouldn't be able to, because I don't own that, and I doubt any library near me has it. Since article cleanup is usually done by a single editor, we should use styles that can be checked by a single editor who doesn't have access to many of the sources. Jc3s5h (talk) 16:10, 16 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  This is true, but I think the artument—that adding (in effect) a requirement to check the source (to determine if formatting is correct) will likely lead to more incorrect formatting—might be sound; a guideline that requires only looking at the article itself, on the other hand, enables lots of lazy people with OCD (such as myself) to ensure that at least the formatting is correct.

  Of course, adopting a guideline that says "sources don't have to actually support what they have been adduced to support" would also make things easier, so "easier" isn't a bulletproof (or BarrelProof! heh! heh...) argument...

  Himaldrmann (talk) 16:14, 16 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  I think Gawaon is correct in two ways:

  • You can't know whether mismatched capitalization is intentional merely by reading the article. This could be mitigated by adding an invisible template.
  • Even if you know that mismatched capitalization is intentional (e.g., you saw the hidden template in the wikitext), you can't know whether any specific ref is "correctly" capitalized without checking each source individually. This cannot be mitigated by anything we do on wiki. Making all the titles follow a standard scheme is easy; some of us can do it practically in our sleep, and if you want proper Title Case, there's a script to automate it. But if you want to use mismatched styles, then there is no way to find or fix any errors without manually checking each source individually.

  WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:36, 15 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

• No, per Nikkimaria, WhatamIdoing, SMcCandlish, etc. Consistency is one of the key factors for the output for readers, rather than a jumbled mess of different styles. - SchroCat (talk) 03:43, 5 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

• Yes. This never should have had a standard at all per WP:CREEP. There is just no value add; the whole point of CITEVAR is to let major editors use whatever consistent style they prefer, and it's fine. It's not worth edit warring over, it's not worth telling them they're "wrong". Wikipedia is not a monograph collection where all the chapters use the same formatting style; it's closer to a library where it's not surprising if one book uses one style, and another a second style. That's fine. Standardizing all books in a library would be madness and counterproductive - if an editor wants to use a style (whether it be title case, original case, sentence case), let them. As far as Gawaon's comment, the whole point of this proposal is to deem original casing an accepted style. So messing with it would not be a "fix" at all. SnowFire (talk) 07:11, 5 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • Side comment: Looking up, there is a lot of ...questionable... claims here, but to weigh in on one claim in particular: the whole accusation that the pro-honoring-the-sources side is really just about auto-formatted citation tools is completely irrelevant and should be discounted by the closer. It is of course correct that the tools should serve the policy, not the other way around. But A) formatting a title is a solved problem, don't trust a tool that can't handle this anyway, and B) Even if it wasn't, it is a principled and reasonable style for an editor to prefer to honor the original casing, even if this was somehow more work for the editor. I'm not thinking website links here, I'm thinking more like old-fashioned books from the 1800s which used capitalization liberally. If someone wants to do this - let them. Just as if someone wants to format everything in sentence case - also let them do that. It doesn't matter. Most editors will be happy to seek advice from the guidelines anyway, it's fine, but we trust them to make the call at the end of the day. That is the Wikipedia way. SnowFire (talk) 07:33, 5 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

    Freedom to preserve the capitalizations used by sources and freedom to utilize sentence or title case, it's how it should be, and it's absolutely a consistent style. Hey man im josh (talk) 13:20, 7 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

    I don’t think “Freedom” is a useful argument here. We don’t encourage freedom-to-write-whatever-you-want on Wikipedia, nor freedom-to-cite-whatever-you-want, and likewise, I see no benefit to being “free” from any cohesive style guide. — HTGS (talk) 21:45, 7 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

    @HTGS: That's not a useful comparison. The argument is that some perceive the style of preserving the actual title used as being a consistent style. Being allowed to preserve the title is a freedom when it comes to writing and improving content. Hey man im josh (talk) 12:37, 8 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

    @Hey man im josh And being allowed to change the title is a freedom when it comes to writing and improving content. My point is that “freedom” is not a useful lens here. — HTGS (talk) 05:10, 10 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

• • This discussion isn't really about standardizing all books in a library; it's about what counts as a standard within a single book (ie. one article). Nikkimaria (talk) 14:09, 5 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  The problem with this argument is that most articles have more than one author, and no chief editor coordinating style. Nobody is penalised for adding content or references that are inconsistent, but nobody should be stopped from editing to make them consistent within guidelines. · · · Peter Southwood ^(talk): 07:09, 15 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

• No. Book titles should consistently be in title case, article and chapter titles should consistently be in either title or sentence case. In both cases regardless of how they appear in their original. Gog the Mild (talk) 14:57, 5 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
• No YesWhy should we spend our time enforcing a policy that reduces (however slightly) the reader's ability to find sources? If It Is Written Like This, Then It Should Be Presented Like This. JuxtaposedJacob (talk) | :) | he/him | 20:22, 7 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Did you mean "yes"? —⁠ ⁠BarrelProof (talk) 20:33, 7 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Looks to me like they did. Pinging @JuxtaposedJacob for clarity. Hey man im josh (talk) 12:38, 8 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, sorry for the error. Thanks for the note. JuxtaposedJacob (talk) | :) | he/him | 15:06, 8 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Preferred but not mandatory, and this shouldn't be forced on the editor adding the citations. Editors should be allowed to input citations in the way they are capitalized in the sources, and other editors should be allowed to change them to a preferred consistent style. This way, we don't add an unnecessary barrier to entry, but we still allow editors who want it to make the citations more consistent. Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 10:30, 8 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

So, in the context of this RFC, I suppose you argue for No (since "other editors should be allowed to change them")? Gawaon (talk) 11:18, 8 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Mostly, but I don't want the result of the RfC to be interpreted as editors not being allowed to input the original formatting used by sources, which was brought up by multiple users on the "yes" side as a potential barrier to editing. Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 11:21, 8 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Consistency is always just an option, never a requirement, so I don't know how a "No" result of this RfC could be interpreted as forcing anyone to do anything. All it does is giving other editors the possibility of further improvements by making reference formatting more consistent. Gawaon (talk) 06:55, 9 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@Gawaon: Saying it's "never a requirement" is incorrect. Consistent reference styling is a requirement at WP:FAC and WP:FLC. Hey man im josh (talk) 16:29, 9 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

True, but FAC and FLC are themselves optional activities, and so is reverting someone who voluntarily corrected the capitalization in an article. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:45, 15 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

"Corrected" is subjective, I believe it to have made the references worse. That's the fun thing about opinions and perspectives. Hey man im josh (talk) 12:11, 15 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

No. It is by far not the most important thing to get right, but a mish-mash of capitalisation styles looks sloppy and unprofessional. Respectable journals and books don't do this, since style manuals recommend to apply the publication's own style to the formatting of reference lists (not just capitalisation, but italics, etc.). So if someone cares enough to correct this, I don't want someone else saying that it is not an improvement, because copying the original is an approved style. JMCHutchinson (talk) 12:06, 8 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

• Yes. edited to clarify: Any capitalization other than all-caps or all-lowercase should be acceptable. The last thing we need is to throw up more obstacles to getting the source cited at all in the first place. Personally, I give few to zero hoots about citation capitalization. I'm fine with describing a preferred style that editors are encouraged to apply and is a legit cleanup task; I could even live with it as a requirement for FAs. But adhering to a specific capitalization style should absolutely not be a requirement for a citation to be correct. Let's not add to the number of details an editor must know and understand to comply with basic expectations. Or nitpicky rules for crabby, territorial editors to use as bludgeons against one another. It's difficult enough onboarding people and getting good, cited contributions as it is. -- Avocado (talk) 13:57, 8 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  I would pretty much agree, which makes me realize something curious – rather than a simple "Yes/No" binary question, this discussion appears to really have three possible options: making casing consistency mandatory for citations, making it a "preferred" style but not a mandatory one, and not making it preferred at all. I've seen good arguments for all three, but people supporting the second option have !voted both "Yes" and "No" (with @Gawaon telling me above that he considered my similar opinion to be a "No" vote), and this does add to the complexity of a future close. Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 16:26, 8 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  The wording of the question sort of lends itself to this confusion. I'll clarify my response. -- Avocado (talk) 17:22, 8 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  I don't think anyone has voted or argued for making casing consistency mandatory for citations. As I stated above, consistency is always just an option, never a requirement, and inconsistencies give an opportunity for further improvement. Gawaon (talk) 07:00, 9 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  As mentioned above, saying it's "never a requirement" is incorrect. Consistent reference styling is a requirement at WP:FAC and WP:FLC. Only replying here as well in case anybody just gleams this comment, and I don't want it to be incorrectly assumed that consistency is never a requirement. Hey man im josh (talk) 16:31, 9 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  I think people are using "requirement" and "mandatory" in two different ways here. It's not a mandatory requirement in the sense that editors can make contributions that are non-compliant, and they should not be reverted. It is a mandatory requirement in the sense that inconsistent capitalization is non-compliant, not one of several compliant styles. The possibility is left open for a second editor to come by and make the contribution compliant with the MOS. This is different than say, the requirement to cite sources in biographies of living people, which is a "mandatory requirement" in both senses. -- Beland (talk) 19:38, 29 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  The problem is determining what inconsistent capitalization looks like. We have people downcasing titles to sentence case, but leaving book titles as capitalized. That's arguably an inconsistent style, one which is harder to track "at a glance", when compared to simply using the capitalization of the title that the sources used. Hey man im josh (talk) 13:28, 30 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  I'm not sure which "titles" you mean are being downcased which are not book titles? Certainly mixing title case and sentence case for the same type of work in the same article is inconsistent, and it's easy to see a glance whether or not that is happening. It's much more time consuming to verify that every single citation is pairwise consistent with the typography of the cited source, because you have to actually load every web page cited and look up every book cited in a database. -- Beland (talk) 19:33, 30 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  I’m not sure what your exact thinking is on this, but I don’t think we should imagine someone inputting a badly formatted citation being punished, or having the citation removed. If someone adds a citation that does not conform to the page’s style, and someone else corrects it, that is just the normal process at work; just like punctuation, spelling, template formatting, etc. — HTGS (talk) 04:14, 10 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  Right, and the idea of forbidding such minor improvements strikes me as very odd. It's like editors would be forbidden to fix typos, split overly long sentences or paragraphs, and make other stylistic and grammatical improvements. Gawaon (talk) 14:52, 10 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  The point here is whether those changes would constitute improvements. Improvements are acceptable, whatever they are. · · · Peter Southwood ^(talk): 11:22, 22 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  But that's a matter of perspective. I personally do not think it's an improvement to change all the titles to sentence or title case, I think it actually worsens the references. But I respect that others are permitted to do so. Hey man im josh (talk) 17:51, 22 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

• Yes. In a sense, we are quoting the name of the work, and I think the name should reflect, as much as is practical, the source. Of course, I still advocate changing allcaps to title case, which does weaken that argument. Beyond that, I think this focus on capitalization style in citations is rather nitpicky, and doesn't need strong policing. - Donald Albury 14:49, 8 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  Donald Albury, Why would you allow changing all-caps? Isn’t that part of how the publishing journal or author chose to present their titles in the same way as all-lowercase? — HTGS (talk) 00:29, 20 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  All-caps is just too jarring in a list of citations. —⁠ ⁠BarrelProof (talk) 02:36, 20 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  Wouldn’t allowing that exception undermine your point too though, Barrel? If you wanted to confirm how something was written when published, you would then have to know that the citation is accurate to the publication except when the original was published in all-caps. — HTGS (talk) 04:33, 20 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  Rather few sources use all-caps, so changing those doesn't affect the overall impression much. All-caps (for a whole citation title) is just too ugly to copy. —⁠ ⁠BarrelProof (talk) 16:29, 20 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

• Yes Presenting the title as it is given in the reference should be normal practice. I don't have a problem with taking best-guess for all-caps titles, since that reduces readability. --SarekOfVulcan (talk) 14:56, 8 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
• Yes per BarrelProof, Avocado and others. There are so many things that often need fixing in references - bare urls, no author name or date, etc etc, all of which matter to finding the ref and assessing its reliability, independence, sustained coverage, etc. Differing title styles in the sources does not impact this as much. As for the visual impact - it's much more important for the article text to use consistent styles than the references. RebeccaGreen (talk) 17:50, 8 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
• Yes I use the "Add a citation" tool in the visual editor. I use the automatic import when possible or copy and paste from the source. I will never, ever manually futz with the the capitalization of all the words merely to match whichever style(s) are already in an article. As much as I appreciate our style guide and consistency, this is busywork that results in minimal improvement. Reywas92^Talk 20:25, 8 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  @Reywas92, I think the question here is less like "I would manually futz with capitalization myself" and more like "Would you recommend reverting an editor who fixed the capitalization on a source?" WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:48, 15 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  But that's not at all the question, the question is whether consistently using the capitalization used by sources should be considered a consistent reference style. Hey man im josh (talk) 12:26, 15 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  If I understand WhatamIdoing correctly, her point is that we are not proposing to ban pasting in citations with the original source capitalization. Many people do that now and it's not a cause for concern. What will change if this passes is that if an article adopts the standard "Source capitalization is allowed to stand" then when someone changes capitalization throughout to title case, someone could then revert, saying "this is already in a consistent capitalization format". If this does not pass that would not be a valid revert. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 12:39, 15 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  That's one way to phrase it I suppose. In essence, we're simply not meant to change citation styles in an article just based on what we like if it's already consistent. Just something to clarify so that we can all get along. Hey man im josh (talk) 14:13, 15 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  Well it looks like no chance of finding a consensus in this RFC, so I'll not worry about it. I'll fix things that look like they need fixing (such as the "Matthew Stafford Voted Comeback Player Of The Year By PFW/PFWA" that started this), and you can unfix things that you think need unfixing based on them being in some sense "consistent" when you think that's the case. Dicklyon (talk) 00:56, 16 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  Perhaps you should consider trying to work better with others considering your behaviour has led to 15 blocks so far, not counting the ban on using automated tools. As has been made clear by this discussion, the changes you intend on making are not uncontroversial, so you should leave them alone if not otherwise discussed. Hey man im josh (talk) 16:36, 16 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

• Yes, per Reywas. Worrying about capitalization in cited sources is approximately the least important possible thing we could be doing with our time. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 23:06, 8 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
• Yes. 1. Retaining the source style (except for all caps) is the most accurate reflection of the source. 2. Requiring one of two citation styles for all references creates a huge amount of busywork that no editor should be doing. These are cosmetic edits and a huge waste of time, especially now that a huge number of references are automatically generated. If you're looking for something to do, go vote on AfDs or fix dead links or something. (I say all this as someone who's had similar disagreements with Hey man im josh as mentioned at the top of this discussion.) Toadspike [Talk] 06:44, 9 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  It's hard to see how "...except for all-caps" doesn't undermine the rationale here—the arguments given for "source style" seem to be, mainly, (a) "it's consistent, even if the basis for that consistency is not immediately apparent to the reader"; (b) "it helps identify sources" or "logically/aesthetically, the source titles ought to match exactly between original & Wiki"; and (c) "it's too much trouble to make sources conform to a style".

  Of course, (c) is sort of a non-starter anyway—it is more work to ensure that the formatting matches source formatting; automated tools do and/or can easily be made to render results in title case; and the question at hand isn't about requiring anything but rather about which standard ought be "reversion-proof".

  But even aside from that, the "all-caps exception" renders the two proposals essentially equivalent, seems t'me: now the (a) argument doesn't obtain ("source style" is, with the exception, less consistent than a universal "title case" style), and neither does (b) (why would any benefit from "matching" cease to apply in the case of caps? "it's just too ugly" is fair—but that's exactly the same reasoning behind the alternative!).

  ...not that it's very important, heh. Really, either side is decently justifiable. (My ever-growing obsessive-compulsive side just prefers the "No" vote, mainly on aesthetic grounds...)

  Himaldrmann (talk) 16:36, 21 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  (Re: the "busywork/effort" argument, just saw that @Nikkimaria said it better than I did, above! IMO, worth a look; I think the comment makes a point which many—myself included—miss or lose sight of: "let's not care about capitalization at all" isn't, strictly, on the table here; either a "Yes" or a "No" will "create" an equal amount of work.

  (Or, well, I'd argue the former actually ends up as more work, overall... but whether either creates it seems less certain, to me—esp. since lots of editors will go around copy-editing by preference regardless. I.e., the effort's not necessarily fungible.)

  Himaldrmann (talk) 16:59, 21 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  esp. since lots of editors will go around copy-editing by preference regardless – I really hope this isn't true. It is very hard not to see such editing as disruptive. Toadspike [Talk] 00:51, 9 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  To clarify, I don't like all-caps because it's usually an artifact of some kind of data retrieval system and not the intended capitalization. If I am citing a social media post by DONALD TRUMP or dodie or a book by e e cummings (people who deliberately use unusual capitalizations) then I would use whatever caps they use, including all-caps or no-caps, because I can assume that it was intended. On the other hand, when a newspaper database tells me that an author's name is, say, CHRIS JONES, but I can see in the original scan that it is, in fact, Chris Jones, then I will not use the all-caps version. Thus, I don't see my opinion as contradictory. Toadspike [Talk] 00:48, 9 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

• Yes It's what I usually do and seems common practice. And our customary practice is what determines policy per WP:NOTLAW. But what does this mean for this page? It doesn't seem to get into this fine detail. Andrew🐉(talk) 07:54, 9 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
• No - WhatAmIDoing is on it. Much contemporary journalism is based on "sentence case." Wikipedia has always been more or less built around Title Case. Flipping current fashion to our traditional style for consistency is highly desirable. Carrite (talk) 16:58, 9 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  Isn't it the opposite? Article titles and section headers on Wikipedia are usually written in sentence case. And both are already considered established styles for citations if used consistently, this isn't what the discussion is about. Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 20:21, 9 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  This is correct. Wikipedia style generally favors sentence case and avoiding caps, per MOS:CAPS. "Wikipedia avoids unnecessary capitalization." Popcornfud (talk) 12:48, 10 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  Not really. When we refer to the title of a published work, Wikipedia prefers title case! MOS:TITLECAPS and Help:CS1 prefer title case. MOS:TITLECAPS says "In titles (including subtitles, if any) of English-language works (books, poems, songs, etc.), every word is capitalized except ... Wikipedia normally follows these conventions when referring to such works, whether in the name of an article or within the text." And in Help:CS1, "Use title case unless ..." —⁠ ⁠BarrelProof (talk) 16:40, 10 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

• Yes. The references are not part of the article prose; it's not our job to decide how titles of articles should have been written, and prettify them (except for allcaps, which is often an artefact of web formatting; note that copy-pasting allcaps titles of recently published articles usually gets you a title with only initial letters capitalised). Also, accuracy helps in retrieving articles that have been moved to a new URL. (Also, languages other than English have different capitalisation rules, so foreign-language sources should always muss up the uniformity.) Yngvadottir (talk) 22:57, 9 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
• Yes, if an article used the capitalization used by sources, I would consider that be a consistent citation-titling format with regard to the sources themselves, as long as the citations are using the exact capitalization of the source titles. However, formatting them consistently in sentence case, or title case, is also consistent with respect to what the readers see. I don't think either of these is unprofessional or inconsistent. – Epicgenius (talk) 23:49, 9 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
• Yes. I wrote a longer !vote with more swears in it but it boils down to: per PMC. -- asilvering (talk) 01:59, 10 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
• Yes and what is this completely unimportant issue even doing at CENT? Shouldn't that be reserved for discussions with actual importance? Fram (talk) 10:21, 10 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  I'm the one who added it to CENT @Fram, based on a suggestion by someone else. It felt relevant enough from my perspective and I believe the ramifications of this RfC, which I expect would result in mass changes to citations, was important enough of an issue. Hey man im josh (talk) 11:18, 10 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

• Irritating question-dodging response: Is it acceptable? Sure, in that having any reliable source, however formatted, is better than nothing. Is it the best way of formatting a citation? No, I don't think so. It makes sense to format citations in accordance to Wikipedia style for consistency, readability and sense, just as we do with all other content derived from external sources, such as names or quotes. (Arguments about whether this is the best use of editors' time are red herrings. This is all volunteer work, and editors are free to work on what they're interested in and what they think they're good at. Are we going to tell editors not to work on articles about obscure jazz records when there are articles about important global conflicts that need improving?) Popcornfud (talk) 12:57, 10 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  It's hardly a red herring, it will be just another avenue for AWB warriors next to capitalization sprees, hyphenation sprees, busybodywork with talk page templates, ... which adds no value but lights up watchlists, pollutes edit histories, and causes friction when things go wrong or aren't as clear as the AWB warrior would like. Codifying into policy or even simply the MOS that this or that is the way things must be done, for as little (dubious) benefit as claimed here, is in the long run causing much more issues than it solves. Fram (talk) 13:24, 10 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

• A rule is not needed here, and what the project doesn't need is more excuses to make mass edits which make little or no contribution to the quality of pages or the ability of citations to eb used, while breaking things and annoying editors.Nigel Ish (talk) 15:07, 10 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  I feel like the breaking things issue can be dealt separately, without forbidding small edits. Wikignoming can be an essential part of the encyclopedia, and restricting cleanup on the basis that it makes "little contribution" isn't especially productive. Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 16:23, 10 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  @Nigel Ish: For what it's worth, I would have previously agreed, and I believe our existing WP:CITEVAR actually covers this, but others have interpreted it differently. There's disputes regarding this subject and it affects content promotion, particularly at WP:FAC and WP:FLC, which have requirements for consistent capitalization styles. Hey man im josh (talk) 19:12, 14 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

• No per WhatamIdoing. The purpose of WP:CITESTYLE is that we should aspire to display references in a professional manner (though we don't care which professional manner). No serious publication styles its references willy nilly based on each referred work's house style. Ajpolino (talk) 22:56, 10 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
• No. While I understand and empathize with the position of many of the yes !voters — citation formatting can be pretty boring work — I believe it's effort that's worth putting in. Beyond the point that consistency looks nice (and I don't think the aesthetic consideration should be dismissed out of hand), consistency also helps readers parse information better. Even seemingly small inconsistencies with capitalization add distractions to articles, and the more of those we can eliminate, the more that readers can focus on the content that matters. (please  mention me on reply) —TechnoSquirrel69 (sigh) 22:10, 11 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  @TechnoSquirrel69 I would argue that using a different title format than the source is itself an inconsistency that bothers readers. If I click on a link to a source, I expect to see the same title as I saw in the citation. Toadspike [Talk] 14:50, 13 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  I don't know what to say to that except to disagree. I've never had that thought myself nor heard of anyone else finding that to be an issue, including in this discussion, as far as I can see. —TechnoSquirrel69 (sigh) 17:31, 13 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  @TechnoSquirrel69: I respect your right to disagree, and I will not try to convince you otherwise, but this is actually my stance as well. I strongly prefer and believe that references should reflect the title used at the source, instead of being modified based on what the person adding the reference likes b est. Hey man im josh (talk) 19:13, 14 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

• Yes. Preservation of the original formatting (where possible) prevents further disputes over what is ultimately an extremely minor issue, like many of the busywork-creating proposals that have been brought as of late. SounderBruce 00:07, 14 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  Seems to me that either choice prevents further disputes, just as well as t'other.

  Himaldrmann (talk) 17:18, 24 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

• yes PER sounderBruce, tHis Is A very Stupid THING to cAre About. charlotte ^👸♥ 01:53, 14 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  Nuh-uh. & In fact: i move that anyone who is—apparently—unable to Capitalize correctly be barred from voting.

  Himaldrmann (talk) 15:22, 19 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

• Yes, it is one perfectly reasonable way in which an editor might choose to format citations. Like any other intelligible choice, it is capable of steady, regular, continued implementation once established as the pattern in an article. Adumbrativus (talk) 04:42, 14 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
• No we write articles using multiple sources, they may each have their own style, but that cannot dictate our style. The proposed rule is also internally inconsistent, with its carve-out for rejecting 'all cap style'. -- Alanscottwalker (talk) 21:42, 14 April 2025 (UTC) Perhaps this goes without saying, but I completely reject the notion that our consistent style choice for article titles in cites has anything to do with text-cite integrity, nor with substantively following sources -- as noted, the proposal is not even based on that unrecognizable notion of text-cite integrity, otherwise it could not exclude all-caps. Alanscottwalker (talk) 16:19, 22 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  @Alanscottwalker: I completely reject the notion that our consistent style choice for article titles in cites has anything to do with text-cite integrity.. – That's literally the entire premise of how many of us do our citations. How can you reject that as a notion...? It's fine to disagree with it, but I find the idea of "rejecting the notion" to be confusing, and to be implying that some of us are not being forthcoming with why we do things. Hey man im josh (talk) 17:53, 22 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  What? I reject the notion because it makes almost no sense, as I said. Alanscottwalker (talk) 21:22, 22 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  I question how preserving the capitalization used by the source makes no sense, but everyone is entitled to their opinion. Hey man im josh (talk) 15:30, 23 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  What makes no sense is imagining that has anything to do with substantive text-source integrity. Text is what is written in the Wikipedia article, source is what's used to support it -- it strains credulity that anyone won't know what the source is because of a title style, and title style certainly does not change, or alter, what the text or the source says. -- Alanscottwalker (talk) 23:36, 23 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  This makes sense, and as far as I can tell, is accurate. Is there any evidence available to the contrary? It is supported by the long term existence of house styles in the publishing industry. If there were problems, it would likely have been recognised before this, and mentioned in the authoritative literature. The argument that the proposed "style" is consistent is orthogonal to the functionality of the citations. · · · Peter Southwood ^(talk): 03:48, 24 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  I agree that the claim of text-source integrity here is on its face absurd. If the style of capitalization on the cover page of a book or journal article was somehow relevant to the claims in its content, then this issue would have come up before in the past thousand years of writers citing each other. Instead, we've done the opposite and developed style guides that maintain consistency within a work. Citations are to help direct a reader to the source, and the style of capitalization in the citation is vital information that tells them what type of reference it is (in most guides that's sentence case for a chapter or article, title case for a book, etc.). Copied-and-pasted styles tell us nothing. Dan Leonard (talk • contribs) 15:30, 24 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

• Yes, it's fine. I don't think the question necessarily has a clear answer, probably lots of considerations, but if the question is being reduced to a binary then the answer should be that it's fine. CMD (talk) 01:14, 15 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
• Yes If this is not allowed, then there should be tools available by default in both source and visual editors to convert the case appropriately. Also, it is common for a document or section to use title case but keep specific words in lower case; the MOS should address this. -- Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz Username:Chatul (talk) 12:37, 15 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  There is. It is called a keyboard. Cheers, · · · Peter Southwood ^(talk): 14:33, 19 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  There's apparently a script that auto-converts to Title Case on demand.

  However, @Chatul, I think the question here is "If someone converts the case appropriately (e.g., to match APA style), should you be allowed to revert them on the grounds that you really intended to use the original capitalization of each source?" WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:58, 19 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  Despite your assertions, the definition of "appropriately" is what the discussion is about. Just mentioning it because, as this discussion has signaled, many belief retaining the capitalization of the source to be appropriate, making changes inappropriate to some. Hey man im josh (talk) 16:07, 21 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  Would you claim that changing the capitalisation of a new citation to an already established consistent style for an article is inappropriate? · · · Peter Southwood ^(talk): 03:57, 24 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  There are plenty of citation styles that I don't like that I recognize as acceptable. Hey man im josh (talk) 19:34, 24 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  That does not answer the question. Is it not sufficiently clear? · · · Peter Southwood ^(talk): 08:08, 25 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

• Yes I have always made it a practice to copy exactly what the source does, and would strongly grumble if forced to do otherwise. I understand that standard capitalization is important in many fields of formal writing. But in this field, the sources are what underpin everything. Preserving the sources exactly is part of our legitimacy. CaptainEek ^{Edits Ho Cap'n!}⚓ 17:38, 16 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  Note that nobody will force you do to otherwise, unless you want to bring an article to featured status. At which point a little time spent to polish it is probably not too much to ask for. Gawaon (talk) 06:38, 18 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  @Gawaon but I do like taking articles to FA. My concern wasn't being forced to do something. It was that matching the sources exactly is better for our legitimacy. CaptainEek ^{Edits Ho Cap'n!}⚓ 03:33, 26 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  Wouldn't legitimacy be better served by designing our articles to look and feel like professionally-typeset journal articles or book sections? If so, we should use citations stylized like those publishers use. Dan Leonard (talk • contribs) 05:56, 26 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  Can you show any evidence supporting this claim that the practice supports our legitimacy? Cheers, · · · Peter Southwood ^(talk): 06:28, 26 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  Can you show me evidence that it hurts our legitimacy? Hey man im josh (talk) 16:21, 28 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  Since I made no such claim, I am under no moral obligation to do so. I expect the person making a claim to provide the evidence that the claim they make has some basis in reality beyond a personal opinion. Deflection is not a valid argument. · · · Peter Southwood ^(talk): 16:39, 28 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

• Yes per WP:CREEP. No need to add more standards for such minor cosmetic aspects. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 🛸 19:39, 16 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

      I see several people citing this guideline, but I'm not sure 100% WP:CREEP applies, very much:¹ the RfC seems to be about what principle to use for cases of conflict resolution, rather than about adding a new rule per se.

      A clarification, not an addition: i.e., "what counts as consistent? must the reader be able to tell it is consistent... or can an editor choose to adopt a style with some—perhaps, prima facie, opaque—internal logic, from which (once established & upon explanation) others ought not stray?"

      Possibly relevant: it seems we've already got some (de facto, at least, but I think maybe de jure also? see: some of SMcCandlish's & StarryGrandma's replies here) standards for the matter—"you ought not use ALL CAPS for source titles", say, or the universally beloved "be consistent"—and so this is really just a question of who gets to revert whose changes (see: original dispute).

  _____________

          ¹ Bit uncertain of my interpretation, admittedly: perhaps the point of WP:CREEP is also—or entirely—to avoid multiplying regulatory content regardless, new rules & clarifications of old ones alike—a "keep 'em lean or people will ignore 'em", sort of thing...?

          ...Hold, though—what's wrong with me? wait. why am I putting so much time into this? no, something... something's not ri

  Himaldrmann (talk) 16:22, 19 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

• Comment: I’m seeing a bit of confusion on what this discussion means, and how it will affect the average editor’s ability to edit. I see this especially by some of the recent “yes” votes, but I’ve also seen “no”s who seem to misunderstand. The short story is: This discussion will not affect whether editors are allowed to be careless when they put in references.
  Editors are currently, and will continue to be, careless with citations, capitalisation and typographic details. But so long as they are inputting citations in good faith, and in a way that is not disruptive, they will not be punished or sanctioned just for not bothering to match house style precisely. If your opinion is “this question doesn’t matter much”, you’re right, and that’s fine… and because you don’t care, it will not affect you. You will be free to copy and paste references as you currently do, no matter what outcome we arrive at here.
  This discussion is for the gnomes; it is for people who care how the encyclopedia is supposed to look when it’s finished (as in “fit and finish” or as in “done and completed”); and it is for those who are worried how a given style will affect usability for readers and editors. If you do not care about such things, the outcome of this discussion should not concern you. This discussion is—among other goals—to prevent disagreement and warring and time-wasting between those editors who do care. — HTGS (talk) 20:54, 16 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I think it's not just a matter of how we prefer articles to look. Maybe this falls under what you refer to as "usability", but preserving the information provided by the sources can be a factor. If we edit the titles of the cited sources to conform to our own capitalization preferences, we are losing some of the information about what was in the sources. Per Wikipedia guidelines, we often look to the sources to find out whether a particular styling is being consistently used in sources or not. If we have edited the titles, that information has been lost and we may be giving readers and ourselves an incorrect impression about what the sources contain. Editing the capitalization of minor words in a cited title is not so much of a problem, but when we start editing brand names, organization names, the names of people, the names of films, etc., that seems like a more touchy subject. —⁠ ⁠BarrelProof (talk) 19:21, 17 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I think yours is a valid and rational reason to !vote “Yes” (even if I ultimately disagree). My comment just above is really only directed to those who think a “No” outcome would mean that they would be in some way liable for copy-pasting rough citations. And fwiw, yes, “usability” is for you. — HTGS (talk) 02:22, 18 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

• Strongest possible oppose to the endless discussions about capitalisation that do nothing to advance this project. Seriously. FOARP (talk) 07:47, 17 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  Thank you so much for coming to a discussion that you care nothing about to let us know that you don't care! Dicklyon (talk) 03:56, 21 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

• No, largely per WAID. Articles are (marginally) stronger with consistent capitalization style. The (likely quite few) readers who notice capitalization style would not perceive "use whatever the source uses" as consistent. Firefangledfeathers (talk / contribs) 16:54, 17 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  I want to support and highlight one of Peter Southwood's points. Many of the "Yes" comments are based on some variety of the text-source integrity argument ("preserving" the style, "accurately" copying the source, "quoting" the source title, etc.). As PS indicates, the weakness of those arguments is "supported by the long term existence of house styles in the publishing industry. If there were problems, it would likely have been recognised before this, and mentioned in the authoritative literature". Firefangledfeathers (talk / contribs) 12:43, 24 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  I agree, such arguments seem to be objectively without merit. Just as well one could postulate that the original font style (serif vs. sans serif) or font size should be preserved. Gawaon (talk) 17:49, 24 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  So because it's a style that some have not chosen to adopt, it's unacceptable? Hey man im josh (talk) 19:35, 24 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  In the long history of the written word, publishers have universally chosen not to adopt this "style" because it has fundamental issues. Standardizing the style of citations within a reference section benefits the reader by providing important context about the nature of the sources and presents a uniform look and feel to the document. Dan Leonard (talk • contribs) 19:52, 24 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  Every single style has fundamental issues, that's why there's not a universal one. It's not clear to me why we retain the capitalization of books vs change titles of other works as we see fit. Hey man im josh (talk) 20:06, 24 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  I disagree with the assertion that "Every single style has fundamental issues". There may be advantages or disadvantages (e.g., amount of physical space taken up), but that doesn't mean "fundamental issues".

  And Dan's correct, AFAICT: despite the existence of dozens of modern style guides, there isn't a single one (except what you call your "personal house style") that requires, or even permits, retaining the capitalization from disparate sources. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:42, 24 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  That's fine for you to disagree. I'll stick with my personal house style when I'm writing and improving content if people stop having needless arguments that make life harder for those who write and improve content, and I'll let you not like it while I dislike your style and say nothing to stop you from using it. Hey man im josh (talk) 23:30, 24 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  @Hey man im josh: Is it your intention that every article should use titles unchanged from their publication, or would you treat this as one style among many that editors might choose to apply to an article? — HTGS (talk) 21:04, 24 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  Obviously it's not my intention to state one style is the correct style, I've been pretty clear on that. I have my perspective for why I think this is a good approach, and I respect that others prefer different styles. I just don't believe that if I apply a citation style consistently, and with a reasonable explanation for what I do, that others should come along and change to their preferred style for no other reason than they like it. Hey man im josh (talk) 23:28, 24 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

• No, per WhatamIdoing, Dicklyon, SMcCandlish, Nikkimaria, and others, including my own comments in various subthreads. We should avoid "styles" which are not visually recognisable as styles.· · · Peter Southwood ^(talk): 14:47, 19 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
• No I am surprised at Toadspike and Hey man im josh expecting source links to have the same capitalization as their target because any differences convey no information on whether the original editor accurately interpreted the source. Using convertcase.net to quickly convert source titles to a consistent title case does not seem overly burdensome. As Peter Southwood puts it, while the original article writer might be annoyed by a gnome imposing uniform title case, it does not make sense to recognize the sources' varied capitalization as a style unto itself. Editors who find articles on the cusp of uniform title capitalization should not have to search through the original sources' titles, which may span web and physical content, in fear of breaking WP:CITEVAR. As alluded to by Rjjiii, Google Books often logs titles with capitalization differing from the original cover, spawning unnecessary dispute over the "original" capitalization. ViridianPenguin🐧 (💬) 22:15, 20 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  The main window at Convertcase.net doesn't work at all for me (maybe it's my browser security settings). Its page for title case doesn't seem to follow MOS:5, and its sentence case uses lowercase for "boston", "johnson" and "fred". That doesn't seem very helpful. —⁠ ⁠BarrelProof (talk) 22:37, 20 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  The site is currently working for me on Firefox with uBlock Origin enabled. While the five-letter rule of MOS:5 seems to be followed, I assume you are noting that Convert Case leaves some short verbs like "is" in lowercase. On that point, the line above MOS:5 linking to WP:Citing sources notes that source titles in citations can differ from MOS:CAPTITLE as long as they are consistent. The site is not useful for setting to sentence case, hence why I only suggested using it for title case, but Microsoft Word's sentence case feature does retain capitalization for the proper nouns you listed. ViridianPenguin🐧 (💬) 01:17, 21 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  The title case converter capitalizes "into" and "upon", which MOS:5 says to put in lowercase. It lowercases "is", which MOS:CT says to capitalize. It also gives a different result for "Puttin' On the Ritz" than what MOS:5 recommends. —⁠ ⁠BarrelProof (talk) 04:50, 21 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  The above mess just shows how much of a fiddly waste of time it is to try achieving uniform capitalization on articles. any differences convey no information on whether the original editor accurately interpreted the source – No, and nobody said it would. What it might convey is whether the source I'm looking at is the same one the original editor used, or if I've got the wrong one, which is in fact very important. Toadspike [Talk] 06:27, 21 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  The information in a citation should be sufficient to identify the source without relying on typography, which may or may not have been changed by the citing editor or someone else, without notice. There has never been a requirement to rely on typography to identify the source on Wikipedia, and probably not anywhere else either. Considering the considerable extra effort it would require from reviewers to check, and the insignificant utility of a typographical check, and that hardly anyone would either expect it to be useful, or wish to use it, I think that those claiming it is useful should come up with some evidence supporting the claim. Cheers, · · · Peter Southwood ^(talk): 09:48, 21 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  The purpose of a citation is not merely to identify the source. If it was, then something like a DOI or an ISBN or a (permanent) URL alone would suffice. Citations also provide more information about a source than its identification, and should. —⁠ ⁠BarrelProof (talk) 16:15, 21 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  I think @PeterSouthwood was just responding directly to the above user's argument about a purported benefit of "source style", rather than claiming citations have only the sole purpose (...although I'll admit, I can't really think of any information they ought convey besides, maybe, "identify source & where exactly within source"). Himaldrmann (talk) 16:42, 21 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  Correct. · · · Peter Southwood ^(talk): 08:42, 22 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  While citations have secondary functions, such as an old publishing date raising doubts on the source's continued accuracy, I struggle to imagine readers unsure in source identification over varied capitalization. It beggars belief that one would rely on title capitalization to distinguish two works of the same name over the array of other atributes in the citation. ViridianPenguin🐧 (💬) 17:38, 21 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  Yes, I would be interested to see a case where this actually occurred in real life. · · · Peter Southwood ^(talk): 08:45, 22 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  It is strange that this comment from ViridianPenguin is a reply to a comment saying that citations are not just for source identification. There is no need to try to imagine readers having difficulty in source identification if it is clear that citations are not just for source identification. —⁠ ⁠BarrelProof (talk) 15:02, 22 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

      Well, since "helps source ID" is an argument several commenters here have adduced in favor of "retain source formatting" (incl. immediately above in this sub-thread), I imagine that's why @ViridianPenguin is trying to imagine it! (But I myself have a "diseased imagination", it has been said–)

      Is there another citation-function that is assisted by retaining source capitalization?

      I see your argument, above, about editors "look[ing] to the sources to find out whether a particular styling is being consistently used in sources or not"—meaning, as in:  "Wiki editors do this when there is some question about the styling of a brand name or so forth"?

    If I understood correctly, then... well, fair point, I suppose!—but:  two questions:

    • 1.) Wouldn't the editors in such a case be better served by checking the originals regardless?  I.e., no matter which decision is made re this RfC, one cannot assume  (a) that the styling used in the title of the ref will be that used in the main text;  nor (b) that the editor who created the citation did so correctly (esp. if the case is contentious/puzzling enough to require combing through sources in the first place).

    • 2.) Does either "title case" or "sentence case", as used in professional publications, require turning—I dunno—"Cool eSports™" (a hypothetical company) to "Cool Esports™", or "FBI Agent Boogaloo" (a hypothetical movie) to "Fbi Agent Boogaloo", or... &c.?‍¹ If not, then in what instances does the standard cause issues, for this purpose?

      ¹: (I'm honestly not sure—I had imagined that the original formatting would be preserved, in a sort of recognized exception; like, were I citing a book entitled The Semiotics of Cool eSports™ Events or whatever, I'd probably capitalize it just like that. Perhaps it is not always so clear-cut as I had assumed!)

      The only other possibility (that I can think of) for "information in citations that ought be preserved" (& which is affected by capitalization) is:  whether the thing is a book, a paper, a chapter in a book, &c.

    For this particular purpose, then, it seems as if both:  (I.) "Title Case for the former, Sentence case for the latter two";  & (II.) "use source styling regardless"—...might have much the same final effect.

    I suppose this could be a decent rationale for the "keep source formatting" position... although—I think that, even here, (I.) would both be easier to apply (esp. for "Wiki-gnomes"), and render the desired result more consistently.

  Himaldrmann (talk) 19:24, 24 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  Wait... now I'm not actually sure a standard like (I) is much easier for "Wiki-gnomes" (you've got to check the source anyway, in that case, to see what kind of publication it was?).

  Well, might look nicer still, anyway...

  Himaldrmann (talk) 19:56, 24 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  @Himaldrmann, I don't think that retaining the source's capitalization can help. Here's an illustration of why:

  Today's Amazon #1 bestseller is The Let Them Theory. Here are the "retained" capitalizations:

  • The Let Them Theory: A Life-Changing Tool That Millions of People Can't Stop Talking About – Amazon's page title
  • A Life-Changing Tool That Millions of People Can't Stop Talking About The Let Them Theory – front cover
  • The Let Them Theory – spine
  • The Let Them Theory – back cover
  • The Let Them Theory – title page
  • The Let Them Theory A Life-Changing Tool That Millions of People Can't Stop Talking About – second title page
  • The Let Them Theory – front book cover flap
  • The Let Them Theory – also front book cover flap

  Which is "the" source's capitalization? WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:55, 24 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  If you asked the publisher they would probably look at you nervously and quietly back away;-) · · · Peter Southwood ^(talk): 12:33, 27 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  Another fair point! I just found a monograph which had "a" (the word, & after a colon) & "oromo", uncapitalized, on SemanticScholar & the university archive ("UiT Munin"); "A" & "Oromo", capitalized, on Wiley & Google Scholar; and—in the published version in Studia Linguistica—the entire title was ALL-CAPS'd!

  Admittedly, it seems clear that "oromo" was an error, and all sides reject all-caps'd (all-capped?–) titles outright anyway... but still: what about the "a", eh?!

  (...But, on the other hand, I'm not so sure about my point 1.), above, any more: true, such an editor would be better-served by checking the originals... but this might not be much of a strike against the given rationale for "source formatting"—the "well it could be wrong" objection I gave there is maybe too general an argument: it applies to other things that are still worth doing/helpful, too.

  (That said, I think I still prefer a visually-consistent style, overall... y'all just need to calm me down when I start getting militant, alright; I obtain strong opinions from the æther & militate against the vile opposition at the drop of a hat, sometimes— [cough])

  Himaldrmann (talk) 01:25, 30 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  I guess that's where we disagree @ViridianPenguin, and I respect your right to do so. From my perspective, I strongly prefer source to title integrity when citing something, and view it as entirely relevant. I respect if someone is working on something and changes that, but it's a consistent style, and that's the point being discussed at the moment. I also think it's a bit silly to call this absurd, but to each their own. Hey man im josh (talk) 16:12, 21 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  No offense intended, and I have replaced "is absurd" with "does not make sense" to avoid any offense caused. My point remains that it is impractical to prioritize "source integrity" when the "original" capitalization may be difficult to pin down. ViridianPenguin🐧 (💬) 17:38, 21 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  While I respectfully believe we should respect the capitalization of the source being cited, and to edit it to conform to our personal house style feels flat out wrong to me. But to each their own. Hey man im josh (talk) 17:50, 21 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  A "house style" is quite opposite to "to each their own". There's no such thing as a "personal house style" in play here. Dicklyon (talk) 03:44, 22 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  I'm sorry you feel that the personal house style I use is not a personal house style, but I respect your right to feel that way. Hey man im josh (talk) 17:54, 22 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  The point here is that 'house style' and 'personal style' are mutually exclusive. · · · Peter Southwood ^(talk): 02:19, 23 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  Except for the fact there are a number of acceptable house styles on Wiki, one of which is my personal choice, as in my personal house style :) Hey man im josh (talk) 15:32, 23 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  Is it really an acceptable Wikipedia house style? I thought that is what we are currently trying to establish. One of the usual (and useful) characteristics of a house style is that it is visibly consistent at the point of publishing. · · · Peter Southwood ^(talk): 04:11, 24 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

• I think, in the context of any article with less than stellar assessed quality, that I care more about having citations than I do about whether the titles are capitalized "correctly". But in the context of A/GA/featured content, my answer to this question is no. Fundamentally, style as such should be recognizable for the purpose of maintenance. A tag to that account and then following arbitrary many other company's style books for titles is not sufficient to be maintainable, as then we would have to deeply trust that whoever last laid eyes on a book will find that capitalization sufficient, rather than being able to make the assessment ourselves. And suffice it to say, I'll expect images of the lettering on the side of dead paper sources to prove following of this imagined style. (This is all ignoring the question's "all-caps titles" as being inconsistent with this probable guideline.) I suspect were we to survey actual other citation styles rather than coming up with the answer on our own, that those styles would have opinions about this question, and would not settle on "however the 'source' styles it!". So no, the use of "source's style" is not a style point to be protected by CITEVAR (or, in fact, more broadly per e.g. previous consensus at WP:BIRDCON as a particularly large consensus on the point of capitalization and "source's style"). (Speaking of which, I assume the context of this question is when we are not using another outside established style, such as Vancouver, MLA, or APA. Answers in the context of an external style guide may differ, but I also know outside styles to be rare, at best.) Izno (talk) 15:10, 21 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
• Yes - I do consider that consistently using the capitalization used by sources (except for all-caps titles) is acceptable. I certainly wouldn't choose to amend capitalisation myself (apart from all-caps), but neither would I revert edits that did so - in both of those cases I think that there are other uses of that editing time that would improve the encyclopedia more. Cheers, SunloungerFrog (talk) 10:01, 23 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  Can you clarify what you mean when you say you wouldn’t revert capitalisation changes? Do you believe that changes in one direction or another should be favoured? — HTGS (talk) 20:56, 23 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  Sure. I generally use an automatic citation generation tool, the one that comes with the most recent wikisource editor. Most of the time that grabs the title from the source, and I use the grabbed title as is, though I remove extraneous bits if they should go elsewhere. For example, if the title came up as "The Cat Sat On The Mat - LMN News", I'd remove the dash and LMN News, and put LMN News in another field, like the website or work or publisher or something, leaving "The Cat Sat On The Mat" as the title. I wouldn't change the capitalisation. If another editor subsequently changed the capitalisation of the title to, for example, "The cat sat on the mat", I wouldn't revert that edit. I wouldn't really care how the capitalisation was altered. My position is probably influenced by my spending most of my editing time on poorly referenced articles, where the addition of decent sources is the vital thing, not whether I should write "On" or "on". Cheers, SunloungerFrog (talk) 22:54, 23 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  Thanks SunloungerFrog, I edit citations in much the same way as you, but I still believe that having a consistent citation style is a position that Wikipedia should take, even if I’m not the one enforcing it. — HTGS (talk) 02:53, 27 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

• Bad RFC: SMcCandlish, et al. are correct that the capitalization style in a reference should follow a consistent style and copying-and-pasting from the source doesn't make sense as it'd be a mix of inconsistent style guides. However, the RFC being framed as acceptable is silly as Wikipedia does not have a single house style for citations. Of course it'd be acceptable to have a miscapitalized reference just as it's acceptable to have an all-caps or otherwise malformed reference. The question should be Should editors be allowed to standardize the capitalization of references in an article to be consistent with one capitalization style? to which the answer should certainly be yes. It's still acceptable to have poorly-formed references in an article below FA. Striking my complaint after seeing how many revisions this RFC prompt went through and simplifying to No per SMcCandlish, et al.: copying and pasting a citation from a Chicago-styled reference and including it next to one copied-and-pasted from an APA one is obviously inconsistent and outside the bounds of WP:CITEVAR. A featured article should look like a formally published work (or at the very least a graduate student's paper), where an editor has taken care to harmonize the references to one citation style. And on that phrase, I strongly disagree with the comment far above that "CITEVAR is not restricted to 'published styles'". If where the MOS mentions citation style we must accept some editor's idiosyncratic mix of incompatible styles, then the term is meaningless. That's not a style. Per Jc3s5h above, If an editor makes up a style just for a certain article, theoretically it's allowable, but in practice other editors can't follow it because they can't read the original editor's mind. Dan Leonard (talk • contribs) 17:58, 23 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
• I'd like to challenge "yes" voters to explain how a copy-and-paste style can be consistent in situations where there isn't a consistent original source:

ISBN 978-1-003-09408-1

On the cover	WIKIPEDIA AND THE REPRESENTATION OF REALITY
Library of Congress data (inside cover page)	Wikipedia and the representation of reality
Google Books	Wikipedia and the Representation of Reality
WorldCat	Wikipedia and the representation of reality
Publisher's website	Wikipedia and the Representation of Reality

How would one use this reference in an article? One could copy and paste from any of these five places and claim it's the authoritative "original" title. However, there's a consistent, logical solution here: apply a style guide and format the citation to fit the article. This doesn't stop readers from finding the original, and a reader who encounters a title-case reference and goes to find the book won't be somehow surprised at the alleged lack of text-source integrity if they use WorldCat (which displays sentence case) to go find the book in person on a shelf (where it's all-caps). Dan Leonard (talk • contribs) 20:43, 24 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I would use the style of the source that I read, that would be the 'original title' that would be copied from. As the purpose of reference to show where you got the information. How it was listed at Google books or Worldcat would be irrelevant. That all-caps isn't acceptable is part of the original question, so any 'yes' vote is already against that. If the original title was all-caps on the covers I would look at the title page. In the odd situation where that was also in all-caps I would use what I felt was appropriate. However I feel this misses the point, the question isn't about how a particular source is styled but whether a mixed style is something that must be changed. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 23:18, 24 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not so sure how it's listed on GB or WC is irrelevant—those places could very well be where an editor encounters a title, or whereto the reference actually links.

Hence, I think friend WhatamIdoing's point is that: as the question is about what can (rather than "must", I mean) be changed without being challenged & reverted—i.e., whether a "keep source formatting" policy "counts" as a "consistent" style (whew, lotta quotation marks–)–these examples proffer some possible complications for such a policy.

E.g., does an edit to match a linked Google Books ref to "publisher's page title" get reverted under a policy of "keep source formatting", or not? Or: does an article with one ref cited from a LoC/inside-page title, and another based upon actual front-cover title, count as "consistent"—or no? In a dispute like the inciting incident for this RfC, what determines which edit stands in such a case?

In most instances, I expect, these "title versions" won't diverge much (excepting LoC/inside-page vs. publisher/GB/WC, the latter of which will nearly always be the same as each other & different from the former—I think?); but it would be ideal to have a clear standard for the edge cases.

Himaldrmann (talk) 12:16, 28 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Where they encountered the title isn't the question, only the details of the sources they read to verify the content. You can't read sources on Worldcat, so how it handles the titles capitalisation is irrelevant. You cite what you see, not what a catalogue tells you about the source you should already be looking at. Nothing is cited from Worldcat or LoC they are cited from the work. Any link to Worldcat, LoC ot Google books are just links of convenience for anyone wanting to verify the content. The question is whether an editor can chose to use the style present in the sources they see, or whether they must follow some external style guide. Editor regularly already do the former. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 13:28, 28 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

"Where they encountered the title" might be multiple places: when I cite a dead tree from my bookcase, I try to find an online copy, or, failing that, a catalog entry. The capitlization isn;t always consistent. -- Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz Username:Chatul (talk) 14:19, 28 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

If you citing a dead tree cite the dead tree, you didn't read the content from the catalogue entry. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 15:29, 28 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I agree with ActivelyDisinterested, I will use any citation details from the paper copy, not an online catalog. (Although I will base capitalization of the title on the style I discern in the Wikipedia article without regard to the capitalization style of the source). Further, if I cite an online copy, I will obtain citation details from the online image of the copyright page, not any description that may appear elsewhere in the website. Jc3s5h (talk) 15:36, 28 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Catalogues matter, because the principal advocate for the pro-match-the-original's actual goal (as stated above) is to accept whatever the automated ref filling tools supply, without having to waste time on correcting it, even to achieve Featured List status. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:25, 28 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I think you've really hit it on the head with accept whatever the automated ref filling tools supply, without having to waste time on correcting it. It's fine if editors want to be quick with adding to articles and use automated tools, that's perfectly fine. But to bring content to featured status (which any MOS rule is really about) we need the human touch to ensure our articles are actually high quality for our readers. Dan Leonard (talk • contribs) 18:21, 28 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@Dan Leonard: Just noting that the featured list venue does have a requirement of consistent formatting in references, and we've long treated this reference style as appropriate. You'll note that both PresN and myself are delegates at WP:FLC and have weighed in on the matter, and I'm also a frequent source reviewer there. Hey man im josh (talk) 18:38, 28 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, but this is an RFC on clarifying the MOS's definition of "consistent", which will obviously affect featured article criterion 2c, regardless of previous discussions on the matter. Dan Leonard (talk • contribs) 18:46, 28 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

(Apologies to @Dan Leonard, whom I somehow got mixed up with @WhatamIdoing—I think because the latter also used the example of various title formats in a response to me, further up. Oops!–)

Where they encountered the title isn't the question, only the details of the sources they read to verify the content.

Okay, suppose an editor is using Google Books and, upon noting a particularly informative passage, cites the work in some article; another editor cites the same (or a different—I think the question remains either way?) work from their physical copy—but either the title is ALL-CAPS or else they have lost their copy's dust-jacket, and so they choose the LoC format on the inside page as "source format"; a third editor also has a physical copy, but looks it up on a catalogue to be sure they've got it right (to steal @Chatul's example).

Suppose further that we thus end up with two or three different capitalizations, in the same article.

Is this consistent? Can one of the editors change the citations of the other two to match his or her own—and if so, which editor; which version counts as authoritative? In the ALL-CAPS case, is the LoC/first-page format then to be taken as authoritative (since it exists within the book the editor is reading)—or else the title-cased Google Books version, since that's also in "the details of the source [the editor] read"?

You might say, I dunno, "the front cover version, & if that's ALL-CAPS then title-case it"; and sure, fair enough... but that still needed specifying, not being immediately obvious from a "keep source formatting" policy—which I think was @Dan Leonard's point (although I can't speak for Mr. Leonard, of course; just my interpretation!).

The question is whether an editor can chose to use the style present in the sources they see, or whether they must follow some external style guide. Editor regularly already do the former.

Indeed—although, since no one (AFAIK) is suggesting that something be forbidden, maybe the question is better-phrased as being about "what standard to use in deciding whose edit can be reverted" (cf. the original incident that spurred this RfC).

Himaldrmann (talk) 15:00, 28 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

If the article originally had a consistent style, title or sentence case alone. Then editors in good faith make edits inconsistent with that style, tidying those edits to match the article style is fine. If any editor, as many do by common practice, chose to use style consistent with the sources they used when originating the article, then why should anyone insist on changing that style. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 15:34, 28 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

The lead of "Citing sources" states "Each article should use one citation method or style throughout." Implicit in that statement is that a citation style should be one that is detectable, maintainable, and something that "writers of research papers" would recognize as a plausible style. Copying capitalization from the sources is none of those. (Second quote copied, with capitalization changes, from front cover, MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers, 7th ed.) Jc3s5h (talk) 15:44, 28 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

This. This is reasonably practicable. It allows corrections, expansions and improvements of citations without requiring editors to jump through hoops blindfolded, and one does not have to do all of them at once, just the ones that one can do at the time and are reasonably convenient, and the next editor can go on from there, also relatively easily. It encourages collaboration. · · · Peter Southwood ^(talk): 16:03, 28 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

This is getting very far away from Dan Leonard original question, which I've answered. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 16:23, 28 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

AD, if the goal is for the capitalization in the Wikipedia article's ref to match whatever is used "Where they encountered the title", then how is a subsequent editor (e.g., one who is doing formatting work for FAC) supposed to know whether you encountered the title on the cover, on the copyright page, on the title page, in a running headers at the top of the cite page, etc.? WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:23, 28 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Is there any need for an editor to change the capitalisation, what practical effects does it have, and why shouldn't it be covered by the rules set out for all other tinkering with references. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 16:53, 28 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Essentially, the reason is because they like it and prefer one way over another. That's the real reason for changing it. We match the capitalization of books, and some people will change references aside from those to sentence case, while leaving the book titles capitalized. That doesn't improve the article in any way, and it goes against the argument that it's more obvious at a glance that the references are consistent. Personally I still haven't heard a good reason not to match the capitalization the sources use, or why such a style would be considered inappropriate. Though, I do respect that others have a preference for a style that they may use. Hey man im josh (talk) 17:37, 28 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Because there are two classes of subsequent editors: FAC reviewers, who must check for citations within any given article should follow a consistent style from WP:CITESTYLE, and who have no idea of the way a previous editor encountered the source and copied the style of the source that I read, that would be the 'original title' that would be copied from; and second, editors contributing new citations, who must follow WP:CITEVAR's defer to the style used by the first major contributor and for whom if the article you are editing is already using a particular citation style, you should follow it, but also have no idea of the intent of earlier contributors. Dan Leonard (talk • contribs) 18:28, 28 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I'm a regular source reviewer at WP:FLC, as well as a delegate there (responsible for promoting from nomination to featured status), and this style does meet our requirement of consistent reference formatting for what it's worth. I mention that because we also require consistent reference formatting. Hey man im josh (talk) 18:39, 28 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Hey man im josh, as a source reviewer, how do you assess whether this style has been consistently used? Particularly for non-web sources? Nikkimaria (talk) 18:42, 28 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@Nikkimaria: I do my best, that's about all you can do. It becomes clear, rather fast, whether they're using title or sentence case when you look over a reference list. If they're not consistently using one, you check whether they're matching the titles of the sources. I'm opening up at least half the links in most cases, and all of them in a lot of cases. It's not that hard, for me at least, to find the titles of works when verifying these sorts of things. I think the difficulty of verifying/telling whether this style is being consistently applies is being vastly overstated. That aspect of it is very different than the rest of a source review, but it is one thing that I check when doing these reviews. Hey man im josh (talk) 18:51, 28 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Certainly it's very clear if someone is using title or sentence case, but we're speaking about when they are not. How are you verifying consistency when no links are provided? Nikkimaria (talk) 18:57, 28 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

This is an RFC redefining/clarifying "consistent" in the MOS and thus WP:FACR#2C and WP:FLCR#5 regardless of previous discussions. Dan Leonard (talk • contribs) 18:50, 28 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

• Yes. In citations, titles of articles and book chapters are enclosed in quotation marks, and the principle of minimal change (WP:PMC) style guideline states that "the wording of the quoted text must be faithfully reproduced". — Newslinger talk 03:14, 28 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  PMC goes on to say: “insignificant spelling and typographic errors should simply be silently corrected”. I would take minor capitalisation differences—such as we are talking about here—to be “insignificant” for the purposes of PMC. Ultimately though, I just don’t think PMC applies at all one way or another, as we are talking about the most minor of style changes, not faithfulness to quoted materials. — HTGS (talk) 03:39, 28 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  It is not a "typographic error" for a source to use a different letter case than the one an editor prefers. Changing the capitalization of quoted text in this way in the article body, without the use of brackets, would be unacceptable. Moreover, doing this type of change hundreds or potentially thousands of times in an article with a large number of citations is not "insignificant". — Newslinger talk 07:27, 28 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  I'm not so sure about this:

  (a) The accepted standard for citations in e.g. academic papers or published works is—as far as I'm aware—to sentence-case or title-case the referenced work (depending on a few factors, such as what exactly one is citing); i.e., it is an unusual position, again just AFAIK, to hold that the titles of referenced works count as quotations that must have capitalization changes bracketed. (Also, are referenced works enclosed in quotation marks? E.g., in the case of a book title, they're just italicized, no?)

  (b) I think the term "insignificant" is being used there to refer to the magnitude of the change in the single case, and not the amount of work involved when extrapolated out across an entire article. I.e., changing "Of" to "of" is "insignificant" for the purposes of the rule, regardless how many times the work might be cited.

  I could be wrong about any of the three major claims above, but this is my thought off the top o' me head, anyway!

  (Also, see below, @Joe vom Titan's comment: maybe MOS:TITLECAPS covers this?)

  Himaldrmann (talk) 10:59, 28 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  @Newslinger, please look at the list of faithfully reproduced titles above. Which one of those is "the" faithfully reproduced version? WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:28, 28 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

• No. MOS:TITLECAPS says that either titlecase or sentencecase should be used consistently in citations. A mix of styles looks unprofessional and distracts the reader. Therefore:

  • Editors should be encouraged to make citations consistent. (However, this is a lot of work, so it's okay if editors don't care and just copy the source. Others can fix it.)
  • As far as it's technically possible, our tools (e.g. citation templates) should help editors apply a consistent capitalization style.
  • The text of WP:CITE should refer to the established guideline at MOS:TITLECAPS.

  — Joe vom Titan (talk) 10:42, 28 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

• Yes. Anyhing else leads to potential original reasearch and/or misrepresentation of the title. Wikipedia follows the sources unless there is a good reason not to, disliking the capitalisation used in the title is not a good reason. Thryduulf (talk) 21:49, 28 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

• Conditional no. In the abstract, I believe that a consistent formatting style within a given article has a much more convincing value-added argument going in its favour, compared against the notion of variant cases, just for the sake of fidelity to the original sources. This is an encyclopedia, and some degree of standardization of format and style is to be expected. While a project wide effort to create one uniform standard would be a waste of community resources (if not a borderline infeasible task), we already have a (well-considered, in my view) rule for at least creating consistency within a given article.
  Now, all of that said, there are some major caveats here. While I endorse the notion of an internally consistent style, the principle should only guide in the case of content disputes. That is to say, if two editors are arguing between "be consistent" vs. "be faithful" approach on a given article, the former should prevail. However, what we absolutely do not need is having this principle abused for time-consuming behavioural disputes. No one should ever be brought to ANI with the rationale "This user refuses to follow WP:CITESTYLE, despite my pointing it out to them repeatedly. This disruptive behaviour needs to stop, and they should be blocked until they accept the standard." That level of investment in, conflict over, and community involvment regarding capitalization is completely out of proportion with the importance of such a style determination. If someone uses the "copy and paste" principle of source citation and the result is an inconsistent style in an article, anyone who wants a consistent style should have two choices available to them: change for consistency's sake themselves, or just live with varying style. No volunteer should be chastized or harassed for a failure to correct the case in a source, no matter how man times they are told about and fail to comply with CITESTYLE. It's just not worth turning up community heat or discouraging good faith editors over. Ever.
  I believe that it is concerns about such nitpickery and weaponization of style guidance which is driving a number of the references to WP:CREEP above, and the general resistance for further formalizing what is clearly an already implicit rule in the existing policy/style guidance. And those concerns are very reasonable. The mere existence of this discussion (and numerous others of a similar nature before it) shows just how misplaced and severe the emphasis that attaches to these types of issues can become, to the dettriment of much more important project priorities.
  So, yes, in principle, I think there is a very preferable approach here. And yet, any codification does carry with it a risk of giving rise to some of the most mind-numbingly pedantic and needlessly combative discussion of the sort that saps community energy, and which we already deal with too much of. In the final analysis, I don't think the recognition of the fact that some people will lose perspective and abuse the rule is reason enough not to have it. That's a slippery slope of its own sort. But we should be able to recognize as a community that certain style matters are so trivial that we should severely limit any implication of behavioural issues from failure to follow the standard approach, even if we maintain the rule as the one which previals when editors go head-to-head over the issue. SnowRise ^{let's rap} 23:01, 28 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
• Yes. I'm amazed this is even a question, given that not using the actual source's capitalization is not using the actual source. It's frustrating enough that Wikipedians have chosen to mandate different capiltization styles from what's in official sources in many cases; actually mandating altering the titles of actual sources themselves is several bridges too far. - The Bushranger _{One ping only} 00:25, 30 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  Did you ever read a style guide? Any style guide? They all mandate either sentence or title case and I imagine every author or editor who has followed a style guide would be most amazed to hear that this means they advice to "not use the actual source". If you were right, essentially every professionally printed book would commit this sin, since every serious publisher follows some style guide or other. Gawaon (talk) 06:49, 30 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  While I think we could defintely do without those first two sonewhat provocative questions, I otherwise have to agree with this (reluctantly, as I have generally found myself in agreement with, and appreciative of, many of TB's perspectives in a number of community discussions). Our policies require us to show fidelity to sources for the purposes of WP:Verifying claims and establishing WP:WEIGHT to shape how we relate the facts of a given subject matter. I know of not even a single policy that requires us to adopt the style or formatting of a source in any respect. If there's even a single style page that does so, I'm not aware of it, and would guess that any such would be concerned with particularly niche and highly specific scenarios. Outside of instances where case may be necessary to properly identify an acronym or proper noun, I see no reason why we would consider ourselves bound by the house styles/stylesheets of our millions of disparate sources when it comes to something as superficial as capitalization--or formatting as a broad matter. That would seem to conflate two very different parallel editorial processes, one of which gives our editors substantial autonomy (style considerations) and another of which affords us very little at all (framing of substantive content), per longstanding community consensus on both. SnowRise ^{let's rap} 22:52, 1 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  MOS:QUOTE does require a certain amount of retention of source formatting, and there have been claims that it applies here. (not in my opinion). Cheers, · · · Peter Southwood ^(talk): 06:15, 2 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  What do you mean by "certain amount"? That section seems to be a litany of ways in which quotations can be reformatted. -- Beland (talk) Beland (talk) 06:57, 2 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  In direct quotations, retain dialectal and archaic spellings, including capitalization (but not archaic glyphs and ligatures, as detailed below in § Typographic conformity). (my emphasis) · · · Peter Southwood ^(talk): 16:52, 2 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  Hmm, I agree that probably in that case the spelling would be retained but not the capitalization, unless we treat that under the rules for non-English citations. -- Beland (talk) 22:10, 2 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  Not quite sure where you are going here, but to clarify my position, I do not consider citation of a publication's title to be bound by this rule, specifically because we are requested to prefer a consistent citation style, following the principles of published style guides which in most, possibly all, cases require the titles to follow a particular capitalisation format. I make no claims to be expert on style guides, and would be interested to see a counterexample from the real world of reputable paper publishing. · · · Peter Southwood ^(talk): 06:38, 3 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  Pah-per puhb-leesh-eeng? You speak the words of the Before Time, in the Long, Long Ago! Great sage, there are many things I would know: What is the significance of the lines of the land? By what magic did little scraps of paper and bits of metal compel strangers to do your bidding, and how is it that former was more valued than the latter? Who shot Jay Are and how many licks did it take to get to the uhtzi-rahl center of the uhtzi hop? SnowRise ^{let's rap} 17:11, 5 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  Gjillions of people still read content on paper, and Wikipedia takes steps so that it can be republished on paper as well. -- Beland (talk) 02:24, 6 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  Oh, no doubt. I'm still one of them to some extent. Indeed, I'd probbaly be even more wedded to traditional print, but for the fact that my ecological concerns/values put some pressure on me to keep up with the times. Although I do think it is worth occasionally stating the obvious point that Wikipedia derives many of its advantages as an encylopedia from its non-print nature and that best practices in Wikiepdia editing take this into account. SnowRise ^{let's rap} 22:17, 6 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  Do you have a point you are trying to make here? Could you try to make it in a comprehensible dialect? · · · Peter Southwood ^(talk): 05:34, 6 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  No, I apologize: perhaps my reference points were a little more dated or obscure than I realized. Suffice it to say, I was not attempting to refute your point. It was merely an incidental attempt at levity over how much things have changed in the last couple of decades. The irony is that the heart of the joke was someone looking back at declining media, but now I'm the one who feels like a fossil... SnowRise ^{let's rap} 22:17, 6 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

• No. Professional publications define how each type of work (book, chapter, web site, etc.) should be capitalized and apply that regardless of how the original work is capitalized (except in special cases [5]). This makes their footnotes look tidy instead of sloppy; readers are distracted less and tend to find the source more trustworthy. A good thing in a world where some people are trying to undermine sources of truth. I think we should be happy to accept non-compliant contributions and happy to let the wikignomes (who may be uninterested in working on other tasks) do compliance work. I agree with editors who have pointed out that determining the "correct" capitalization used by the original source is impossible for some works (like books), time-consuming to verify, and more likely to result in tedious discussions. We already have clearly defined rules and already apply those rules to fix all-caps titles. The fact that sloppy capitalization in citations is widespread does not seem like a good reason to leave it that way. If someone is worried about the number of person-hours we spend on this, then the best solution is to partly automate the process.

If this RFC is resolved in favor of "no", then we will affirm article-level consistency internal to footnotes. I think the next step would be to change the MOS to have Wikipedia's flavor of title case (defined at MOS:TITLECAPS) override the capitalization style of the citation style being followed, in the same way that we override curly quotes and other formatting elements. Right now, capitalization in the article body can be inconsistent with capitalization of the exact same work in a footnote, which looks like an error. Such a change would bring about full per-article consistency, but also increase site-wide consistency in a relatively gentle way (compared to say, requiring Citation Style 1 for all articles). -- Beland (talk) 07:52, 30 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

FTR, we actually already have a semi-automated way to tidy up, mentioned in a previous section: User:ZKang123/TitleCaseConverter. -- Beland (talk) 08:31, 30 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Which, as mentioned above, has flaws in what it chooses to downcase. Common nouns may be downcased when in actuality they're parts of proper names. Hey man im josh (talk) 13:32, 30 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Sure, that's why it's partly automated and not completely automated. Human review is still required on every edit, but humans are saved from having to do most of the mouse and keyboard work. -- Beland (talk) 19:40, 30 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

It looks like this discussion is ready to be closed. I realized it makes sense to ask the flavor question no matter the outcome, so I started Wikipedia talk:Citing sources#Which version of sentence or title case should be used?. -- Beland (talk) 18:14, 14 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

• No mainly per SMcCandlish; treating a title as quoted text is possible because our citation template are coded against the norm. And it is not OR to change a title in leading case to sentence case. Frankly title case should be the norm, but that won't happen. In the meantime, nor should this. Cheers, Fortuna, Imperatrix Mundi 13:57, 30 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
• Sometimes yes, sometimes no. If you're following a specific style guide, use its capitalisation rules. If you're following APA, Man Bites Dog is wrong, because Man bites dog is the only correct capitalisation. But if you're consistently using a style guide that says "use the original work's capitalisation", or consistently doing something else (e.g. I always write in a variant of MLA that accommodates <ref> and I always capitalise; see my Southworth House (Cleveland, Ohio) GA) that says to use the original or doesn't specify anything, Man Bites Dog is correct. Nyttend (talk) 06:10, 1 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  Is this a variant of MLA that's professionally published or your own customization or ? FWIW, Chicago style has an exception to its capitalization rules for works that are strongly associated with a specific capitalization. -- Beland (talk) 09:08, 1 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

• No. It's clearly not that important to follow the source capitalisation consistently given that this proposal comes with a baked in exception for allcaps titles: what is it about sentence case titles which makes them specially worthy of respect in a way that allcaps titles are not? That aside, this would be at best an impractical policy both because formatting is not necessarily consistent even within a publication (if a book has its title formatted in one way on the cover, another on the title page, and a third in running text in e.g. the foreword, which is the canonical formatting? similarly for journal articles, where the listing on the contents may not match the title as given at the start of the article or how that journal formats its own references to that article), and because it's much more work for anyone trying to make the formatting consistent. MOS:CONFORM already says Formatting and other purely typographical elements of quoted text should be adapted to English Wikipedia's conventions without comment, and MOS:TITLECONFORM specifically says that title capitalisation should be made to typographically conform with the citation style used in the article. Why should we have an exception to this purely for references? Caeciliusinhorto-public (talk) 10:43, 2 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
• No. Articles should use an internally consistent style. Graham (talk) 07:45, 3 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
• No. Articles should have an internal, consistent, style. John Smith (2005) "HELLO MY NAME IS BOB" NEW YORK TIMES in one citation, Bob Kane (2019) "Review Of Hello My Name Is Bob" Chicago Tribune, and Norm Manning (2009) "I like apples, but not cherries" ohio daily news is nowhere near a sane way to present things. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 14:53, 5 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
• No. In my view, Wikipedia should stick to the same principles that every competent publisher has applied for at least a century: pick one recognised citation style for an article and apply it from first reference to last. Mixing whatever capitalisation the websites, databases or book jackets happen to use may feel “faithful”, but on the page it looks slap-dash. The minute a reader sees three different headline styles in the reference list, they stop thinking about content and start wondering whether anyone bothered to proof-read the thing. That is not the impression an encyclopaedia ought to give. Esculenta (talk) 16:14, 9 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
• No, this is not acceptable in all articles. It is fine in random Start-Class articles where there are more important problems to solve, but it is not acceptable in Featured Articles. Randomness is not a citation style. —Kusma (talk) 16:44, 9 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
• This seems to me a context-free RfC, and as such I'm struggling to opine even a month after seeing it. It depends, dammit. At FAC, the answer is obviously no: articles should follow a consistent citation format, whether that be sentence- or title-case - that's one of many aesthetic niceties we're allowed to enforce at that level. As far as articles created by new editors, the answer is yes, because if a new editor is adding formatted citations that's a Good Thing we want to encourage, and under no circumstances should we be giving newer editors a hard time over such a triviality. And if this is, as I suspect, about editors wanting to enforce stylistic preferences on articles that are neither new nor at FAC, then I suppose I reluctantly come down as a no, insofar as nobody should be going around changing consistently formatted citations to follow source capitalization; but also I really don't see how someone doing the reverse is spending their time well, either. Vanamonde93 (talk) 04:57, 16 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
• No The fact that we are carving out an exception for all-caps (very common) is a strong sign that this is a bad idea. FWIW, I don't think most readers look at the references at all, and only the real cases would notice the capitalisation. WP:CITESTYLE: citations within any given article should follow a consistent style. MOS:CONFORM: A quotation is not a facsimile and, in most cases, it is not a requirement that the original formatting be preserved. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 21:41, 16 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

By my count, this discussion had:

• 35 responses that boil down to "no", with pleas to not abuse this rule in a time-wasting way, and a few requests to only use title case or sentence case. Arguments for "no" include: reformatting to fit per-article style would continue the practice of paper publishers; multiple styles in the same article makes it look sloppy and potentially untrustworthy; it's much easier to verify MOS compliance if there is a single style.
• 31 responses that boil down to "yes", with arguments for straightforward importation for URL citations, generally saving time by not reformatting, and the importance of source-citation correspondence.
• 1 plea for no rule (not sure what that means, given the question was how to interpret an existing rule)
• Complaints about even having this discussion

There seems to be general agreement it's more important to have citations than to have them formatted properly, and thus support on the "no" side for accepting inconsistent citations and leaving reformatting to gnomes or article maturation or GA/FA review. There was also a general desire to save time by avoiding future disputes over capitalization. There was support for the "reformat all-caps" rules on both sides, which some saw as inconsistent with the citation-source correspondence rationale for "yes".

A major point made by some supporters of "no" is that in some cases, the publisher of a single work (especially those on paper) will use multiple different capitalizations, so it is impossible to determine which is the "correct" one that Wikipedia should use for articles adopting a "follow the sources" capitalization rule. This raised the concern that "yes" would result in many capitalization disputes for these sources.

I have already declared my support for "no" in the discussion, so I can't close this one. Given the length I thought it might be helpful to do some tallying-up and summarizing. I welcome comments on anything I've gotten wrong or missed (especially from anyone who declared support for "yes") while we're waiting for an uninvolved editor to take this one on. -- Beland (talk) 00:40, 14 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

A point that I think the close needs to make clear is what the status is of the proposed "match the capitalization of the source" style for articles in general (i.e. not just at FAC). I don't think that style has ever been accepted at FAC, but does that mean that prior to this RfC it was not an acceptable style other than at FAC? And if so, and this is a no-consensus close (as seems possible), what effect does that have on someone's CITEVAR claim that a gnome should not alter an article's citations from this style to a unified style? Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 02:23, 14 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

FAC is intended to be an article where all our guidelines are followed. It shouldn't be imposing non-guidelines that don't have community consensus, but conversely, practices that have emerged at FAC are likely good ideas to follow. Either way, FAC style should not be viewed in isolation to the wider project. CMD (talk) 03:46, 14 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@Mike Christie: I'm not a regular at FAC, but PresN has noted that it's been accepted, and that a number of their promoted articles actually followed this style. It's apparently been a more recent thing to start to enforce the usage of title or sentence case. Hey man im josh (talk) 15:58, 14 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Perhaps that was FLC, not FAC? But I should clarify that I'm not arguing that FAC has any particular authority here, just that I would like the close to judge what the status of this style is. If it was acceptable before this RfC, and this RfC is no consensus, then presumably it's acceptable now; conversely if it wasn't acceptable before, no consensus would imply it's not acceptable now. I could imagine a close which says it's no consensus but it's not clear what the status was before; that would leave us with a mess but perhaps that's what we'll get. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 16:26, 14 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I understand why you may think he was speaking about FLC, given his activity there, but PresN made clear that they were speaking from their FAC experience (26 featured articles). To clarify though, we do, at FLC, accept the style being discussed as a consistent one.

My perspective however is that, if it's deemed no consensus, then it SHOULD be acceptable at FAC. I believe a couple coords at FAC are stating that it's not a consistent style, which is why it must be changed. If there's no consensus that it's not a consistent style, they should not be forcing those who may have a different position to adhere to their preferred style in order to have their nomination promoted. If there's no consensus that it's not an acceptable style, then it should be allowed. Again though, I'm not an expert at FAC, but if there's a close that says there's no consensus not to use that style, then that style should be acceptable by right. Hey man im josh (talk) 17:09, 14 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

If a style was found to be acceptable at previous FACs there will be evidence of this in the history of those FAC discussions. A diff or three would be relatively convincing in comparison to the current assertions without evidence. Cheeers, · · · Peter Southwood ^(talk): 11:29, 15 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I mean, there's an implication that this style was never acceptable at FAC, which has also not been demonstrated. Hey man im josh (talk) 17:12, 15 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I clicked on the "random featured article" link and started inspecting citation capitalization style. The first example I came across with a mixed style was Rainbow pitta, which I see at the time of promotion had both title case and sentence case used for article titles. There was no mention of this on the featured article candidate discussion, so either this was missed or this was not considered an error. Same with Ursula K. Le Guin; the different styles used by different newspapers was simply imported. The FAC discussion included some picky elements of formatting in footnotes, but did not mention these capitalization differences.

Participants in the previous discussion pointed to two Featured List Candidate discussions where reviewers requested visually consistent capitalization on sources: Wikipedia:Featured list candidates/List of works by Wole Soyinka/archive1 and Wikipedia:Featured list candidates/List of medical eponyms with Nazi associations/archive1.

So it seems past practice has been inconsistent. -- Beland (talk) 19:52, 15 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

In the "[https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Rainbow_pitta&oldid=1137046030 Rainbow pitta" case it appears book citations use title case and journal citation use sentence case. (I'm using a version from February so this discussion won't be confused by any edits to the article.) I'm not sure what to make of source 11, since I'm not familiar with the subject matter. With the possible exception of one source, it seems to be a consistent style: title case for major works and sentence case for journal articles, which is recommended by some style guides. Jc3s5h (talk) 21:10, 15 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

It looks to me like source 10, "Displays and Postures of the Rainbow Pitta and other Australian Pittas", is a journal article in Australian Bird Watcher using title case, and source 14, "Why do Rainbow Pittas Pitta iris place wallaby dung at the entrance to their nests?", is a journal article in Australian Field Ornithology using sentence case. -- Beland (talk) 00:04, 16 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@Beland: Regarding the featured list candidates, PresN and I are both delegates there (responsible for promoting lists to featured status), and to be clear, the criteria there does not require people to choose title or sentence case. That was the request of specific reviewers who may have been told to do so at FAC. Hey man im josh (talk) 15:01, 16 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Wikipedia:Featured list criteria #5 requires compliance with the Manual of Style; presumably that was how those reviewers interpreted the citation style guidelines? -- Beland (talk) 19:52, 16 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Personally I'm not seeing how this can be closed as anything other than no consensus, or possibly that yes, it is a consistent style (my stated position, to be clear). If this is closed with a result of "matching the title used by sources is not a consistent style", then I'm likely to challenge the close. I've not seen anything convincing to say that it's unacceptable and inconsistent to do so, just that some people don't like it or see it as consistent (I see some of the styles that others use as inconsistent, but they're still acceptable). I think that such a close would quickly lead to some individuals making mass changes, and in order to avoid that disruption, I'd likely challenge it quite quickly. Hey man im josh (talk) 16:04, 14 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

We really should not attempt to bludgeon the person who comes here to close the RfC. Cheers, · · · Peter Southwood ^(talk): 12:27, 15 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

The "no" side has a slight numerical advantage, so I'm a bit reluctant to recommend closing this as "yes". The decision seems somewhat arbitrary - people are just valuing different things, none of which is closely related to a policy or guideline with strong consensus that would outweigh a numerical tally. 51% "no" and 46% "yes" is not a large numerical difference, so the idea of recommending a "no consensus" close makes sense.

What does "no consensus" mean? Because the follow-source style has been accepted for some featured articles in the past, does that boil down to "yes" because there is no consensus to ban this choice? Or does it mean people are free to argue against that style choice on per-article basis? Should we add text like the following and let the chips fall where they may?

Some editors prefer "consistent" capitalization in the sense of being consistent with sources (though primary sources sometimes have multiple conflicting capitalizations of their own titles), others prefer "consistent" in the sense of using title or sentence case for the same types of work for visual consistency in the same article.

-- Beland (talk) 00:18, 16 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

One aspect to the "yes" votes is/should also be, who determines what should and shouldn't be sentence case? There are proper names I've seen downcased in references by some editors when they're mass downcasing references. Hey man im josh (talk) 16:08, 14 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Downcasing proper nouns sounds like a simple error that violates English spelling rules.

Your question is a bit unclear. If you are asking who determines whether a given string should be formatted as title case, sentence case, or something else, that is determined by the citation style chosen for the article (which is whatever style was established first, absent consensus on the talk page or topic-specific guidelines, per WP:CITEVAR). That is the same for both "no" and "yes" scenarios. In the "yes" scenario, if the chosen style is "follow the sources", then the source determines the capitalization (though the source may have multiple different capitalizations to argue over).

If you are asking which set of rules (Wikipedia vs. third-party) should apply if a chosen third-party style specifies sentence case for a given string, I have asked that question at Wikipedia talk:Citing sources#Which version of sentence or title case should be used?. -- Beland (talk) 18:08, 14 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

The aspect I'm considering is that there are tons of names that haven't been discussed on wiki because they don't have an article, that some may end up downcasing inappropriately. For instance, someone downcased the name of a website the other day in a reference, seemingly not understanding it was actually a name. There's also a lot of proper names that contain common nouns, which some people, by default, always downcase, sometimes inappropriately based on this. It may seem like a simple error, there are some folks who do it regardless of what past consensus has demonstrated. That's part of the problem with the sentence case approach, in that, it ends up with improper capitalization as often as it "fixes" it. Hey man im josh (talk) 17:11, 15 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Ah, that sounds like an argument against using a citation style that requires sentence case: any manual changes to capitalization introduces the possibility of error. And an argument for "yes" - the "retain the source capitalization" minimizes the possibility of introduced error. -- Beland (talk) 19:16, 15 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]