Forum:Decapitalization - what we've learned

So the Decapitalization Project has been going on for a few months now, and here's a few observations I've made regarding the project:
 * 1) Having the name on the wiki be anything but exactly the same as the ingame name causes varying amounts of confusion - this includes capitalization
 * 2) By not adhering strictly to ingame naming, we're opening the door to subjective rather than objective naming of articles; Is it "Law Dog" or "law dog"? "Black Bart's Bane" or "Black Bart's bane"? just to name a couple recent examples.
 * 3) All and all it seems pointless to differ from the ingame naming since that's what people are going to be looking for. The wiki software is somewhat tolerant in searches, but if someone searches for "Assault Rifle" they're gonna get Assault Rifle as opposed to Assault rifle - the first being a redirect to the second, despite the fact that they searched for the exactly right name.
 * 4) While using lowercase seems like it would be just as consistent as using the exact ingame names, that has proven to not be the case, and there's a lot of inconsistency in article names simple because of how the English language is capitalized in various ways.

I'm not gonna say the project is a failure; in fact, we've learned quite a bit from it. However, I think it's time we re-evaluate it in light of what we learned, and consider overturning it and returning to using the precise ingame names, capitals included.

On the subject of unmarked locations, those can remain with the lowercased names unless they're referred to ingame, in which case they follow the conventions of the reference. -- 22:43, September 25, 2010 (UTC)
 * One problem with using strictly in-game spelling is that the game itself does not seem to strictly follow any one consistent capitalization standard.
 * Perhaps we could add a field to the infoboxes? In-game spelling:
 * I'm not sure what exactly you're saying about the search box. My experience is that if my search returns a redirect page, I'm automatically redirected to the article. I do get a little "redirected from ___" notice, and if I click on that I end up on the redirect page. Are you experiencing something different?
 * Also, a big big thank you to everybody who has been doing so much work on the capitalization project!--Gothemasticator 02:48, September 26, 2010 (UTC)


 * Not to be a bit negative here or selfish either and i understand where your coming from with the Exact ingame names but it would be quite a task to go back through and recapitilize every single article that was de-capitilized. The Bulk of the De-capitilizing was done by Tezzla Cannon and Myself with others pitching in every now and then. Re-capitilizing everything will probably take quite a bit longer to do than decapitilizing did, and we'd have to go back and re-capitilize every link as well. Plus with the Series being Revived now we can expect to see at the very least 3-4 more Fallout Games coming out, thats hundreds, possiblly thousands of articles we'd have to decide whether or not they should be capitilized or Decapitilized. Personally I think we should just leave things be until Fallout NV comes out and we get all those articles sorted out then we should decide whether or not to go back and recapitilize everything. ---bleep196- 03:20, September 26, 2010 (UTC)


 * Woooo.
 * While Goth has a point about the games not being entirely consistent on caps (IE, ".44 Magnum JHP", but ".44 magnum FMJ" in F1 and F2), the fancy overview pages like Laser Pistol or .44 Magnum (Fallout) would do a great bit to remedy that.
 * However, I do think now that article text itself should stay uncapitalized, but with piped links. I'll re-capitalize everything myself if I have to! Nitty Tok. 03:28, September 26, 2010 (UTC)
 * Alright just wanted to make sure someone had thought about it first. And i totally agree we do need to make it consistent across the board. By the way i moved the De-capitilization project into Finished projects Because all the articles have been de-capitilized even if their links haven't been.---bleep196- 03:32, September 26, 2010 (UTC)
 * To boot, J.E. Sawyer and the rest of the gang have always used capital letters when describing things. Why on earth are we ignoring not just the games, but the developers too? Nitty Tok. 20:35, September 26, 2010 (UTC)
 * Because we're not a game but a wiki/encyclopedia covering the game. We use capitalization standards that are suitable for an encyclopedia (like Wikipedia), and not ones for in-game usage, even if we do cover the in-game usage. Different conventions being standard in different context for the same term is nothing wrong nor surprising. Ausir(talk) 15:44, September 27, 2010 (UTC)


 * That said, I think that some article names do need to be recapitalized, as some of the moves were not well thought out - e.g. I just moved the Roach King back to capitalized name, as it's a unique, proper name of a single NPC, not a generic designation. I think this is not ambiguous in most cases, however. Ausir(talk) 16:42, September 27, 2010 (UTC)