Talk:Operating system comparison

From BYOAC New Wiki
Revision as of 01:12, 5 April 2006 by Felsir (talk | contribs) (Explained the reasoning behind the name change.)
Jump to navigation Jump to search

This title should be reverted.

The major words in the titles of books, articles, and songs (but not short prepositions or the articles "the," "a," or "an," if they are not the first word of the title) should be capitalized.

example: One of Ringo’s favorite books is The Catcher in the Rye.

Buddabing 14:33, 4 April 2006 (EDT)


A wiki works like an encyclopedia, topics are capitalised when required: The Catcher in the Rye is the official title of the book and should be capitalised as such. It is common to spell the abbreviation to operating system as capital OS, but the term as such is not capitalised.

Another (good) reason for titles in a wiki to follow this convention is the usage in references. You can now reference to this page is a normal (intended) way: [[operating system comparison]]. In a running sentence like "you can take a look at the operating system comparison" there are no weird constructions required.

The same thing holds true for articles named Arcade Monitors. The plural form of the article makes creating wikilinks horrible, every time you wish to point to this article in a running sentence "with arcade VGA it is possible to connect your computer to an arcade monitor." One has to construct this: [[Arcade Monitors|arcade monitor]]. Had the article properly named "Arcade monitor" the wikicode would be this: [[arcade monitor]]s (note the extra s added, the wiki software includes the s in the wikilink automagically). Now one can argue "the article is about arcade monitors (plural)" but in fact it is not, the article is there to inform people about what an arcade monitor is. The article should start with a sentence like "An arcade monitor is a display device, especially made for arcade machines.". The article then could mention types etc. etc.

Exception to this always use singular forms are lists: the article "jukebox software" and "front-ends" are in fact lists of front-ends. There could be an article called "front-end" that doesn't name specific pieces of software but simply statesthe definition of "front-end". Wikilinks should then connect these articles ("For a list of front-ends look here").

See also Wikipedia on capitalization for more detailed reasoning behind capitalization in the MediaWiki software. Felsir 02:12, 5 April 2006 (EDT)