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Proposed update to MOSCAPS regarding racial terms

Consensus against changing MOSCAPS to capitalize "Black" when used as a racial or ethnic descriptor. A raw vote count has a significant majority opposing the change, although an analysis of arguments made suggests a closer outcome than the votes, as many of the arguments made in opposition were rebutted or missed the point entirely. Ultimately, the decisive question is how RS use the terms; while several reliable sources (and particularly US sources) have adopted capital-B Black for the racial grouping, several counter-examples were also provided (including examples from US sources).


There was some disagreement as to whether this discussion should limit itself to the US context, and whether the capitalization of other terms of color (mostly "White") should be considered in tandem. My assessment of these attempts to refine the conversation is that there may be comparatively more appetite for capitalizing "Black" in US-related contexts, there is still no consensus for supporting such a change as a rule at this time, and sufficient opposition such that the matter should not be reopened at a project-wide level until either further developments occur (i.e. more style guides adopting capital-form) or significant time has passed. signed, Rosguill talk 21:51, 10 December 2020 (UTC)

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

The Associated Press recently updated its style guide so that "Black" as in "Black people" should now be capitalized.[1] Should we apply those same changes to our MoS? Should similar racial terms, such as "White" be capitalized as well? –LaundryPizza03 (dc̄) 05:30, 21 June 2020 (UTC)

LaundryPizza03, Where is this discussion taking place? I could not locate a link to it. Thanks. FULBERT (talk) 15:24, 21 June 2020 (UTC)
The problem I've always had with this is that it raises the specter of capitalizing White, which has been used ... um ... problematically at times. EEng 19:02, 21 June 2020 (UTC)
The AP announcement is here. A discussion of the appropriateness of writing Black but not White is here. I think it's too soon to propose a change in the guideline, the announcement is only two days old.Peter Gulutzan (talk) 19:42, 21 June 2020 (UTC)
And the AP hasn't yet determined whether to capitalize "white" as a racial designation. Dhtwiki (talk) 22:37, 21 June 2020 (UTC)
Has this been resolved? Swiftestcat (talk) 03:48, 9 September 2020 (UTC)

I don't think we need to wait. Capital B has already become the standard at a number of media organizations and publishers, AP is a bit late to the game and it is already commonly used in Wikipedia article - there is just a lack of consistency that needs to be rectified. Capitalizing "W" in white is non-standard as the usage is different, Black people are a self-identified (and externally identified) ethnic group or people. White people remain more likely to identify themselves either as European or by a particular ethnicity eg English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh (or British), French, German, Italian, Russian etc. This may change and if "White" becomes more widespread we may need to revisit that. See for instance this explanation from the Columbia Journalism Review: "we capitalize Black, and not white, when referring to groups in racial, ethnic, or cultural terms. For many people, Black reflects a shared sense of identity and community. White carries a different set of meanings; capitalizing the word in this context risks following the lead of white supremacists." 104.247.241.28 (talk) 13:43, 23 June 2020 (UTC)

The fact that there are "white supremacists" means that there are certainly those who self-identify, or are identified by others, as "white" (as if that wasn't the case all along); and the particular sin at the white supremacist websites seems to be that they write "White" while writing "black", the mirror image of what we would do here if we were to capitalize one but not the other, especially if the practice is made inflexible. I know of at least one article, White Latin Americans that does it both ways within the article but is not inconsistent within sections ("white" and "black" or "White" and "Black" within sentences, paragraphs, and sections). Dhtwiki (talk) 04:57, 27 June 2020 (UTC)

It does not matter what AP does. What matters is what the majority of RSs do. MOS:CAPS: "Wikipedia avoids unnecessary capitalization ... only words and phrases that are consistently capitalized in a substantial majority of independent, reliable sources are capitalized in Wikipedia." – Finnusertop (talk ⋅ contribs) 15:00, 26 June 2020 (UTC)

References

  1. ^ Press, Associated (20 June 2020). "Associated Press changes influential style guide to capitalize 'Black'". The Guardian. Retrieved 21 June 2020.

The NYT now uppercases "Black". More detail on that decision and the request by the immediate past president of the National Association of Black Journalists:

courtesy collapsed

Based on those discussions, we’ve decided to adopt the change and start using uppercase “Black” to describe people and cultures of African origin, both in the United States and elsewhere. We believe this style best conveys elements of shared history and identity, and reflects our goal to be respectful of all the people and communities we cover.

The change will match what many readers are seeing elsewhere. The Associated Press and other major news organizations have recently adopted “Black,” which has long been favored by many African-American publications and other outlets. The new style is also consistent with our treatment of many other racial and ethnic terms: We recently decided to capitalize “Native” and “Indigenous,” while other ethnic terms like “Asian-American” and “Latino” have always been capitalized.

We will retain lowercase treatment for “white.” While there is an obvious question of parallelism, there has been no comparable movement toward widespread adoption of a new style for “white,” and there is less of a sense that “white” describes a shared culture and history. Moreover, hate groups and white supremacists have long favored the uppercase style, which in itself is reason to avoid it.
— The Times will start using uppercase “Black” to describe people and cultures of African origin, both in the U.S. and elsewhere. Read more in this note from Dean Baquet and Phil Corbett.

Black is an encompassing term that is readily used to refer to African Americans, people of Caribbean descent and people of African origin worldwide. Capitalizing the “B” in Black should become standard use to describe people, culture, art and communities. We already capitalize Asian, Hispanic, African American and Native American.
This step is a good first step to affirm the significance of being Black in America. This matters. It’s to bring humanity to a group of people who have experienced forms of oppression and discrimination since they first came to the United States 401 years ago as enslaved people. I ask for this change in honor of the Black Press, which already capitalizes the “B” in Black, and in honor of the legacy of the 44 brave men and women who founded the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) in 1975.
— One Thing Newsrooms Can Do: Capitalize "B" When Reporting About the Black Community". New York Amsterdam News. (by Sarah Glover, immediate past president of the National Association of Black Journalists)

I think it'd be worth making this a formal RfC now. (not watching, please {{ping}}) czar 01:48, 4 July 2020 (UTC)

NYT does not now consistently uppercase "Black" [1]. They just permit it to be capitalized (alone or with "White", "Brown") in op-eds and other opinion pieces, and they capitalize the entire name "Black Lives Matter", same as they do with "Occupy Wall Street" and other named movements. They may have, early on, announced an intention to follow AP on this, but they are not actually doing it, probably due to objections, though I doubt they'll be very clear about why they're quietly backing off from it.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  18:52, 19 August 2020 (UTC)
@SMcCandlish: check your dates. The NYT's editors' note was published on June 30, five days after the op-ed you linked to. The decision to capitalize "Black" in this context was announced in the paper itself on July 5. Since then, they do in fact use the uppercase "B", e.g. [2][3][4]. —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 20:41, 31 August 2020 (UTC)
Ah, I see. Well, it's just one publisher and isn't dispositive of what WP should do, nor what professional writers across English (and they style guides they follow and help shape) are doing. This "capitalize Black and that only" thing is a US-centric and highly politicized knee-jerk reaction to racist politics and racial-justice activism of the last 6 months or so, and is even counter to the broader language-usage reforms pushed by progressives for years (which would treat "Brown" and "White" the same way, and had already been gaining substantial traction and not just in the US – this is basically a conflict between multiple progressive/left factions what has not even been resolved in that sector yet, much less to a new global-English norm). Aside from the WP:POV and WP:SOAPBOX/WP:ADVOCACY/WP:GREATWRONGS problems (which also makes it a MOS:TONE issue) with WP adopting a "Black alone" position, whether that idea ever actually becomes accepted as a norm in English is a WP:CRYSTAL matter (and is frankly unlikely). Pushing for it ahead of its vast-majority-of-usage establishment is also pretty obviously a WP:RECENTISM failure. It's also a WP:CIRCULAR problem: we've already seen evidence many times that WP's own style choices end up having a strong effect on the blogosphere and even on mainstream publishers; e.g., over-capitalization of a subject on WP leads to a clearly observable spike in unnecessary capitalization of the same thing in other publications, which can be directly tracked with tools like Google Ngrams).

Anyway, NYT publishes (on a very slow cycle) its own style guide, which is widely divergent from others even in journalism, and has little effect on writing outside their own newsroom. While NYT is not quite as stylistically aberrant on so many things as The New Yorker (which says it gets more mail from readers about one of these quibbles than about any other subject!), it's still on that side of the fence; like The Economist and a few other publishers, they intentionally diverge from mainstream publishing norms as a means of branding/distinction. Not a single thing in MoS is based on NYT style, and MoS does not jump onto any style-shift bandwagons until they become norms reflected in the majority of the style guides that MoS is actually based on (Chicago, Hart's, Scientific Style and Format, Fowler's and Garner's), which is generally a 5–10 year shift cycle. This is why, e.g., WP was slow to adopt singular they vs. awkwardness like he/she or treating he as generic, a preference for US over U.S., and dropping the comma before Jr. or Sr. in a name, despite them already having become more common than the alternatives in mainstream writing.
 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  04:42, 1 September 2020 (UTC)

So the NYT style was "good enough" for WP when it was lowercasing both, but now the NYT capitalizing "Black" is not dispositive of what we should do? Seems like you're arguing against yourself here. See my additional reply under #Extended discussion below. —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 21:39, 4 September 2020 (UTC)
Many newsrooms are now capitalizing the B in Black.[1]
AP: The decision to capitalize Black.[2]
The NY Times: Why We’re Capitalizing Black.[3]
FOX News Media to capitalize 'Black'.[4]
Why hundreds of American newsrooms have started capitalizing the ‘b’ in ‘Black’.[5]
2600:1000:B031:3E57:C563:E6:7258:A121 (talk)
"Many newsrooms" just assiduously follow AP Stylebook, and made this change the moment AP did, automatically (and are now trying to justify it to their readers, many of whom are understandably objecting). The entire AP Stylebook sphere is essentially a single source, and is questionably relevant at all on a style decision like this, because their choices on many things (including this one) do not align with other types and writing and publishing, which follow other style guides. Most importantly, WP is not written in news style, a matter of clear, formal policy, so "lots of newspapers do it and new style guides like it" is a useless argument in an MoS discussion. When most academic book publishers consistently do something and their style guides, like Chicago Manual of Style and New Hart's Rules (AKA New Oxford Style Manual), on which it MoS is primarily based, say also to do it, then there's a good argument for WP to do it.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  04:42, 1 September 2020 (UTC)
The Chicago Manual of Style now advises capitalizing "Black". See #Update below. —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 01:18, 26 September 2020 (UTC)
  • Comment For context on other similar terms: Note also that The New York Times explicitly does not capitalize "brown" or "white" but the AP are issuing a decision on "white" soon. Other sources are explicit about capitalizing "Black" but not "white" (e.g.) but remain silent on other things capitalized by the AP such as "Indigenous". See also, e.g. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/06/time-to-capitalize-blackand-white/613159/. If the RfC is narrowly about "B/black", then I don't think it's going to go anywhere as it will inevitably get derailed around "B/brown", "I/indigenous", "W/white", etc. Unfortunately, this is one of those times when you have to make the RfC more broad to get better responses. ―Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 00:28, 9 July 2020 (UTC)
  • Oppose due to WP:NPOV. My first take was that we should follow English grammer, but that would leave us capitalizing African but not black and Caucasian but not white. I believe that if we make a change it should be to uniformly capitalize all "races"[a] and ethnicities. Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz Username:Chatul (talk) 14:33, 9 July 2020 (UTC)
  • This is a tough one in that these organizations are explicitly adopting terms because of non-neutrality; it's a situation where holding to style guides can arguably run afoul of NPOV. If the trend is to capitalize entire generic racial groups (Black people) versus specific ones (Asian-Americans) having certain ones be the only odd ones out seems wrong and less consistent from our standpoint of usage. (I'd also be hesitant to do anything that is a specifically NA phenomenon given how many issues we already have in preferring one set of idiosyncrasies and specific cultural norms that aren't representative.) Der Wohltemperierte Fuchs talk 10:51, 14 July 2020 (UTC)

Notes

  1. ^ The way people use "black" has more to due with Limpieza and the Nuremberg Laws than any rational classification
  • Capitalize "Black" (no opinion on "White") for articles with MOS:TIES to American subjects. This is consistent with MOS:CAPS: only words and phrases that are consistently capitalized in a substantial majority of independent, reliable sources are capitalized in Wikipedia.—Bagumba (talk) 12:31, 14 July 2020 (UTC)
  • Oppose. As others have said, I feel uppercasing Black (and Brown) but not white would violate NPOV and is fairly controversial among scholars for various reasons. It's also a relatively new decision reached by the AP and other news outlets. -- Calidum 14:27, 14 July 2020 (UTC)
  • Capitalize both, per WP:NPOV, WP:SOAPBOX, and because they are serving as proper names of ethnic groups, and because doing one without the other is linguistically senseless, and because this is largely an Americanism (see, e.g., The Guardian [5][6], BBC News [7][8], and The Conversation [9]), plus obviously an example of WP:RECENTISM. [My second choice would be "capitalize both, or neither, consistently in the article, and capitalize both in proximity to other ethno-racial terms like "Latino" and "Asian". Capitalizing one but not the other is just a WP:NPOV violation and is not permissible.]

    We have multiple newspapers of record telling us that the move to capitalize Black alone is political and polarized, and that these publications are doing it explicitly as socio-political messaging [10][11]). BLM editorials using "Black" but "white" drive this activism connection home clearly [12][13] (and I say that as a huge fan of McWhorter as a linguist, BTW). Capitalizing both has long (my entire life and then some) been standard practice at many publications already. If Black and White are good enough for CNN [14][15], the U.S. Census Bureau [16], APA style (Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, one of the most-used academic style guides in the world, and influential on MoS) [17], among many others, then they're good enough for Wikipedia. While, yes, various publishers went the other direction and down-cased both (e.g. [18][19][20][21][22]), many are now reversing this decision (entirely or – often with dubious and subjective rationalizations [23] – in a reactive and politicized half-measures way). It simply is not acceptable to capitalize one but not the other here, for neutrality reasons, regardless what some publishers (who have paying audiences and advertisers to appease) choose to do, and I do not believe that anyone in this discussion doesn't actually understand that. Some are just seeking to skirt it to further their socio-political viewpoint. It's one I share, but we all know better than to do that on Wikipedia.

    I have always favored capitalization when these words are used in this broadly conglomerating/generalizing ethno-racial sense, because it is jarring and likely offensive to have something like "The organization's Asian, black, Caucasian, and Hispanic advisory board members all agreed with the policy change", down-casing one category as if denigrating them. Used in this way, "Black" and "White" should be capitalized also because they are serving as stand-in names for (not literal descriptions of) human ethno-racial categorizations, and are thus acting in proper-name capacity, by definition. Just because "Black" is an imposed (and arguably originally derogatory) exonym is irrelevant; we don't write "navajo" with a lower-case n just because that's an exonym for the Dineh people. When "Brown" is used this way, it should also be capitalized; however, it is slangish and has nowhere near the penetration into mainstream, formal writing as "Black" and "White", so WP should probably not be using it except in quoted material. If we don't capitalize these terms, we also have a consistency problem with very similar but more specific ethnic names, like Coloured, a particular mixed-ethnicity group in South Africa, about whom that term is always capitalized (and always with a u).

    None of these terms should be capitalized when not used in this ethnic manner: "My Hispanic half-sister is more brown that me." "Albinistic people can look very pale white in some light, but are actually rather pinkish because their lack of pigmentation makes their skin a bit translucent." "The mole on my back is virtually pitch black." Just because it has something to do with coloration and skin at all doesn't make it an ethnic label and thus doesn't make it a proper name.

    Terms like "indigenous", "aboriginal", and "native" should only be capitalized when they are used in the same manner, as a name for, not just a description of, a specific group. Thus, people from the native populations of Australia are referred to as "Aboriginals", "Aboriginal Australians", or (decreasingly) "Aborigines"; it's effectively their official collective name. But it's lower-case a [or i or n] in "There are several different languages families among the aboriginal [or indigenous or native] peoples of the Americas." Other examples that have become proper names are Native Americans, and First Nations.
     — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  00:56, 15 July 2020 (UTC); revised: 10:28, 16 July 2020 (UTC); 2nd choice added: 03:21, 8 December 2020 (UTC)

    • I wouldn't call the "Ideas" section of The Atlantic's website (not the print magazine) a "newspaper of record", but even that source says "head[ing] off ambiguity" is one of the reasons for capitalizing "Black" as a racial identity.[24] As does the New York Times source, saying, "there are grammatical reasons — [Black] is a proper noun".[25] So clearly it's not just socio-political messaging. And as the Atlantic piece also points out, the invention of racial categories such as "Black" and "White" was itself a form of socio-political messaging.[26] (Note that this Britannica article capitalizes "Black" but not "white".) Politics is the reason we call America "America" and not some Indigenous name.
      I also don't see how one can argue on the one hand that what's good enough for CNN et al. is good enough for us, and on the other hand dismiss different style choices by otherwise reliable sources as based on "dubious and subjective rationalizations". Does CNN not also have customers and advertisers to please? Whatever sources' politics may be, NPOV doesn't mean excluding all subjective viewpoints (as if that were possible), but fairly and proportionally representing the mainstream viewpoint as mainstream. —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 19:50, 29 August 2020 (UTC) (edited 01:53, 31 August 2020 (UTC))
Some overly detailed back-and-forth:
      • "Heading off ambiguity" applies equally to capitalizing White and Brown as ethnical labels, obviously. So, no, that is not at all a rationale for capitalizing Black and Black only; it's a rationale for moving away from lower-case for these labels, as a class. That some news publishers are doing this in piecemeal fashion tells us nothing about what WP should do. On the rest of this, I don't see what point you're trying to make. Whether the racialist "color labels" have a political origin isn't under question, and not relevant; they are in two cases in overwhelming use with a third (Brown) in some use (while some others like Yellow and Red are now basically taboo). So WP will tend to use the two common ones, absent a compelling reason to add them to WP:WTW and avoid them. The capitalization debate (which cannot be equate with the historical labeling/naming pattern) going on at and about these news publishers right now is not a matter of established English-wide usage, but is an ongoing socio-political controversy. To the extent WP can be on any side of it at all, it has to be within the confines of our own neutrality and other policies, which clearly point to using Black and White evenly, or capitalizing neither. Your claim about America doesn't seem relevant. (And I wouldn't agree with it anyway. "We" call the US America when we're being lazy, since the term has broader meaning; WP shouldn't do that in it's own voice. And the decision to name the western hemisphere America / the Americas was more what we would today call sociological. European colonial powers were not temperamentally suited to using native names if they could come up with an alternative – though this was less true in what is now the US and Canada than in most of what is now Latin America; many of our states/provinces, rivers, etc. in North America have native names, or anglicized approximations of them. Anyway, the colonial powers did not generally consider the natives to be polities of any kind to engage in political negotiations with, but "heathens" to just subjugate and convert or eliminate. Most of the few treaties entered into with native rulers were later ignored. To the extent the choice of America in particular, from Amerigo Vespucci, was "political", it was between German (actually Holy Roman Empire) cartographers, and Spanish elites who would have preferred naming the so-called New World – the actual name Vespucci proposed – after Columbus. Old squabbles between two dead empires aren't "politics" today in any sense WP cares about, and America stuck primarily because it appeared on the two most popular series of maps published in the early 16th c.; it was basically an accident, and certainly nothing like a political movement.)

        As for "good enough" for CNN and WashPost, I'm making the point that the WP:GREATWRONGS sentiment that "black and white" or "Black and White" are a wrong, an injustice, is not sustainable, because major mainstream publishers regularly use both, and this includes ones well aware of and even politically sympathetic with the activist voices making that faulty great-wrongs argument. There are certainly great actual wrongs in the US's racialized history, and that of the entire post-medieval interaction between Europe and Africa, but it has nothing to do with "white" vs. "Black" typography. See below (extended discussion section) for why confusing these labels with the subjects labeled (and the historical experience of those subjects) is a serious logic failure. See MOS:SIGCAPS also, for the principle that Wikipedia never employs capitalization as a signifier of importance/distinction, since there are better ways to write, and operator-overloading capitalization for that purpose is confusing and sloppy. Anyway, none of this really has anything to do with this news publisher's versus that news publisher's style guide being preferable. WP's writing is not derived from news style at all (WP:NOT#NEWS policy), and MoS is based on academic style guides not any news ones, so which news publishers prefer what is simply irrelevant, except to establish left-wing bias in this "capitalize one only" practice, and to demonstrate that this supposed sea change is not at all consistent across them, and is even counter to long-standing progressive efforts to capitalize uniformly instead of using lower case. Basically, we have blundered into a confused and nowhere near settled sudden slapping-each-other contest between left-wing factions, and WP's job is to ignore it, or to cover it neutrally if it rises to encyclopedia-worthiness, not pick a side and join in the socio-political pissing match. We especially do not leap to sudden "popular" changes in style matters, but wait for the major, academic style guides MoS is actually based on to mostly or entirely settle on something, which they only do after a new norm has clearly emerged among the majority of high-end academic publishers. Even then, we may reject such a change if we have encyclopedic neutrality or accuracy reasons to do so. Otherwise we would probably need no style guide beyond "follow Chicago for American English, or Oxford for British/Commonwealth, and beware the following short list of technical restrictions imposed by the software." But we obviously have a much more nuanced style manual than this, custom tailored to WP's purpose and our globalized and "ultra-general" audience.

        WP's writing is especially geared to precision (disambiguation) and avoidance of bias. This makes "Black and White" the obvious first choice (aside from avoiding these terms altogether), and "Black and white" the obvious last choice, with "black and white" being okay and our normal mode to date, since it is what is most often done in high-register English, like books and journals from respected academic presses. No option can possibly please everyone. For my part: like most people with an anthropology- and linguistics-enhanced education, I've already been writing "Black and White" as ethnicity labels for a long time. I just don't force that here, since it is not (yet) WP's house style.
         — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  05:55, 1 September 2020 (UTC)

        • Heading off ambiguity is what your own source cites as a rationale for capitalizing "Black". Whether you or I think it's a good rationale is irrelevant.
          My point in bringing up the racist origins of so-called racial groupings is that one can't separate politics from established English-wide usage. Which is why arguing against the sources is a fool's errand. Language evolves, and WP's usage will simply evolve to match it, whether or not you or I agree politically with it.
          Using Black and White evenly, or capitalizing neither is not what NPOV is about. If I'm wrong, please point to where NPOV says to give equal validity to all sides in a controvesy. NPOV actually means reflecting the preponderance of reliable sources, without giving a false impression of parity. If a majority of RSes decide to replace "white" with "clown people", then we would follow that change as well, per NPOV.
          Anyway, the colonial powers did not generally consider the natives to be polities of any kind to engage in political negotiations with, but "heathens" to just subjugate and convert or eliminate. Exactly my point. If that's not a political stance, I don't know what is.
          The WP:GREATWRONGS sentiment that "black and white" or "Black and White" are a wrong, an injustice, is not sustainable – I don't think anyone here is making that argument. Wikipedia guidelines don't apply to the content of reliable sources, they follow from them. So one's personal evaluation of RSes' arguments as faulty is, once again, beside the point.
          WP's writing is not derived from news style at all...MoS is based on academic style guides[,] not any news ones – this is the only policy-based argument I can see here, and it would be far more convincing if it weren't embedded in such a tedious anti-PC diatribe undercut by many other off-topic complaints about political "bias" etc.
          WP's writing is especially geared to precision (disambiguation) and avoidance of bias. This makes "Black and White" the obvious first choice...and "Black and white" the obvious last choice – WP's writing is geared toward avoidance of editorial bias. Once again, we simply follow the majority of reliable sources, whether we personally agree with their style choices or not.
          In general, this is a lot of space to take up in arguing pointlessly against the stated reasoning of various publications who have argued for capitalizing "Black". It doesn't matter whether we agree with their reasoning. To satisfy MOS:CAPS, a style just has to be used by a substantial majority of RSes. If one wants to argue that the change disqualifies, say, The New York Times as a reliable source on U.S. politics, that's another matter. —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 21:39, 4 September 2020 (UTC) (edited 22:09, 25 September 2020 (UTC))
SMcCandlish I am in the process of creating a style guide for Australian articles on this very topic, and countrywide RS style guides use capitals for Indigenous and Aboriginal, use Aboriginal people in place of Aboriginals or Aborigines (only using the latter when quoting historical usage). (Incidentally, Indigenous includes both Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.) The other convention is to always use the group name (e.g. Kaurna) where the individual has identified themselves as such, or the language being talked about is specific. Just FYI. :-) I'm just not sure where is a good place to place the style guide when complete - at the moment, it's in the Australian project pages. Laterthanyouthink (talk) 02:41, 20 November 2020 (UTC)
  • Oppose. Echoing others in that this goes against WP:NPOV. OTOH, this seems like an opportunity to review if the publications and institutions adopting such a policy—presumably more politically rather than grammatically motivated—should be considered reliable sources in the future, seeing as they are headstrong to wear bias justified with tortured pretext about "identity" on their sleeve. 93.106.91.218 (talk) 18:54, 15 July 2020 (UTC) — 93.106.91.218 (talk) has made few or no other edits outside this topic.
  • Support 'Black' because more and more RS are going that way. No objection to tabling and discussing again in a month or so, but I think that's where we're headed. Oppose 'White' until RS start using that, too. —valereee (talk) 23:21, 15 July 2020 (UTC)
    FWIW, the AP, NYT, WSJ,[6] and Columbia Journalism Review[7] are now capitalizing Black. —valereee (talk) 10:21, 16 July 2020 (UTC)
    @Valereee: Sources already are capitalizing "White", too (e.g.: [27][28][29], etc.). Many publishers have been doing this for decades. The "only capitalize 'Black'" idea is primarily left-leaning American newspapers, over the last month or so, and for declared political reasons. The vast majority of publishers capitalize neither, though for reasons I've detailed above, the most linguistically sound approach is capitalizing both because they are serving the function of proper names. That's a sound enough reason for WP to capitalize both despite neither "Black, White" nor "Black, white" being the dominant style across all sources in the aggregate. MoS has more than one concern, even with regard to capitalization. "Only capitalize what sources almost always capitalize" is a default position, but it can be overridden (like anything in these guidelines) by additional encyclopedic concerns like grammatical function (e.g., we use many en dashes where less studious publishers misapply hyphens), and the neutrality policy.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  10:37, 16 July 2020 (UTC)
    SMcCandlish, left-leaning like the Wall Street Journal? White doesn't seem to be as common. The Atlantic, yes.[8] The Columbia Journalism Review, no. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Valereee (talk • contribs) 10:49, 16 July 2020 (UTC)
    I have to presume you missed the word "primarily", since it was included for a reason. When someone writes a sentence that parses to "the sources doing this are mostly on the left, with some exceptions" and you respond with an example of an already known exception, you have not made any form of argument, much less addressed the substance of my rebuttal. Cf. Hand-waving.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  02:09, 22 July 2020 (UTC)
    [I]t can be overridden (like anything in these guidelines) by additional encyclopedic concerns like grammatical function – isn't this exactly why sources like the AP are arguing for the capital "B" in "Black"? As the AP's vice president for standards says, "The lowercase black is a color, not a person ... These changes align with long-standing capitalization of other racial and ethnic identifiers such as Latino, Asian American and Native American".[30] —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 00:50, 26 September 2020 (UTC)
    Already covered that, right from the start: AP's argument applies to all ethnic "colo[u]r terms", including White.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  03:21, 27 September 2020 (UTC)
  • Oppose capitalizing one but not the other, as well as opposing putting any hard and fast rule in place regarding capitalizing these terms (I'm assuming none is in place now). Dhtwiki (talk) 23:58, 15 July 2020 (UTC)
  • Oppose - Capitalize both. Magnolia677 (talk) 16:16, 21 July 2020 (UTC)
  • Strong oppose until broad consensus is shown in sources; Wikipedia only should reflect what it is already there in the world; mabe we need to go back to our purpose: "to benefit readers by acting as an encyclopedia, a comprehensive written compendium that contains information on all branches of knowledge." We should not try to shape the world, only to reflect the way it is; part of this it that we should only endorse a change in the way it is if the change is supported by the consensus among reliable sources. Thus this change, which does not appear to be yet commonplace among sources, is outweighed by historical president. If the world is racist/not valuing race highly enough (by not capitalising races), it is not our job to change it. WT79 (speak to me | editing patterns | what I been doing) 20:31, 23 July 2020 (UTC)
  • Tentative support for "Black" for US-related subjects per MOS:TIES. As the AP is US-centric, it would be better if more countries' top style guides joined in. That said, the AP's logic that "lowercase black is a color, not a person" seems eminently reasonable. —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 15:43, 4 August 2020 (UTC) (edited 21:46, 30 August 2020 (UTC))
    • But that is not any kind of argument against "White" (or "Brown" for that matter). Historically, even the now disused "Red" and "Yellow" used in an ethno-racial sense have also often (though not consistently) been capitalized [31][32].  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  18:43, 19 August 2020 (UTC)
      • And if the AP started using "Red" and "Yellow" to refer to people (capitalized, of course), then I'd consider supporting the same usage here. Till then, let's try to stick to the matter at hand. I'll emphasize that I haven't explicitly taken a stand vis-a-vis capitalizing "White". —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 22:21, 28 August 2020 (UTC)
  • Strong oppose for consistency. One source pondering the use of it does not justify reworking grammar rules as an entirety. Adjectives are lowercase in every other capacity. Further, it breaks WP:NPOV by capitalizing a single form of identity. Anon0098 (talk) 23:23, 11 August 2020 (UTC)
    Yeah, and NYT also capitalizes (capitalises, sorry) "Black" in the slogan "Black lives matter instead of leaving it lowercase:"black lives matter". What I really don't understand is why this specifc slogan refers to African-Americans as "black" rather than the more correct "African-American". Also, if we're going to capitalice every racial term, why not do the same with the generic words "Man", "Woman", "Child" and so on the way the Bible capitalizes the words "You", "He", "Him", "Your", "His" and so on? --Fandelasketchup (talk) 21:31, 11 August 2020 (UTC)
    I don't think I'll every really understand it, honestly. It serves no purpose other than to put one race on a pedestal over others, which is what I thought was the opposite of what we are supposed to be doing, especially on Wikipedia. Anon0098 (talk) 05:02, 12 August 2020 (UTC)
Digression about the Bible, NYT, and movement names:
  • The Bible does not generally capitalize those pronouns; it does so in reference to Jesus and God ("His mercy", etc.). And we would not capitalize "Man", "Woman", "Child" because they are not ethno-cultural names, just everyday categorization labels like "tree" and "asteroid" and "elbow". NYT does not generally capitalize "black" [33] (though they permit it in op-eds and other personal editorials/opinion pieces); they're capitalizing "Black Lives Matter" as a proper-name phrase for a semi-organized movement, like Anonymous (the hacking group) and Occupy Wall Street.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  18:43, 19 August 2020 (UTC)
The Bible is not written in English. Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz Username:Chatul (talk) 22:12, 31 August 2020 (UTC)
Of course it is, if you're reading an English-translation edition. All of them are entirely consistent on this. (What Jesus said was "His word", what Moses said was "his word").  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  02:15, 27 October 2020 (UTC)
  • Strong oppose for consistency + wikipedia needs to remain neutral Devokewater@ 12:04, 16 August 2020 (UTC)
  • Comment: many of the "oppose" !votes seem to contend that capitalizing "Black" but not "white" reflects a value judgement. This logic is somewhat strained. The newsrooms now capitalizing "Black" seem to be using it like a proper noun/proper adjective, à la "Italic peoples" vs. "italic type". Whether any of us find that decision "neutral" is irrelevant; we should just follow the most reliable sources. —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 17:23, 17 August 2020 (UTC)
    • That doesn't mean "just the sources I prefer to read", though. Newspapers and other media are nowhere near consistent on this, and plenty of publishers considered reliable by Wikipedia are either capitalizing neither or capitalizing both. There is absolutely no question that capitalizing "Black" alone is the highly charged taking of a socio-political stance, the use of language as an armament in the "culture war". That puts it outside WP's style orbit by definition. If "Black" and "White" are good enough for, say, The Washington Post [34] then they're good enough for Wikipedia. If "black" and "white" are good enough for, e.g., The New York Times [35], then they're good enough for WP. I favor the capitalization (of White, too), for linguistic-logic and WP:CONSISTENT reasons I've given above, but either will do.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  18:43, 19 August 2020 (UTC)
      • I meant a "value judgement" by Wikipedia editors, not newsrooms; I should have been clearer about that. Not sure where I've suggested cherry-picking sources. The AP is "preferred" as a style guide by many respected publications (in the US at least). And not to get too far off topic, but I think the "culture war" really began when European colonial powers designated "black" as a separate racial group in order to use their supposed inferiority (as a people and a culture) to justify slavery. It's good to have some perspective on these things. —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 22:04, 28 August 2020 (UTC) (edited 00:18, 31 August 2020 (UTC))
      • Also, the NYT does now capitalize "Black", e.g. [36][37][38]. —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 20:23, 31 August 2020 (UTC)
      • Note: to clarify further, comments such as "Do it for all or do it for none", "If we do decide to do this we need to do it for all races", "if we make a change it should be to uniformly capitalize all 'races'", and "it breaks WP:NPOV by capitalizing a single form of identity" show a basic misunderstanding of NPOV. Per policy, NPOV means proportionally reflecting the views of reliable sources, without adding our own editorial bias or giving a false impression of parity. It doesn't matter whether any of us think the proposal is fair in a real-world sense, only that it accurately reflects the sources. —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 18:18, 6 September 2020 (UTC)
  • Oppose: this wokification of Wikipedia is really getting tiresome. There is no reason, other than politics, to insist on capitalizing "black" but not "white"—it's a childish game and far beneath the dignity of a serious encyclopedia. Elle Kpyros (talk) 22:35, 27 August 2020 (UTC) — Ekpyros (talk • contribs) has made few or no other edits outside this topic.
  • Oppose. I think this is pretty clearly at odds with MOS:CAPS: Only words and phrases that are consistently capitalized in a substantial majority of independent, reliable sources are capitalized in Wikipedia. Plenty of RSs do not capitalise black so we should continue to default to lowercase. From a writing perspective, I think capitalising black and white is pretty senseless; these terms do not derive from proper nouns (unlike, for example, Asia - > Asian). I think the choice to capitalise is made more on political grounds than matters of logic or clarity. That's not to say that politics isn't a good reason to change how we write things, but to me this simply feels sanctimonious. (I hope I'm not on the wrong side of history there; it will be interesting to see if this trend survives the language's general trend away from capitalising.) Popcornfud (talk) 16:28, 28 August 2020 (UTC)
  • Oppose – This creates more NPOV problems than it solves. --- C&C (Coffeeandcrumbs) 03:54, 16 September 2020 (UTC)
  • Oppose if other skin colours of people aren't capitalised. Too inconsistent. If black is capitalised that should be because of grammar, not politics. That grammar should then be consistently applied to all similar words: white, brown, yellow, red. Leo Breman (talk) 13:40, 18 September 2020 (UTC)
  • Oppose per MOS:CAPS requiring a "substantial majority of independent, reliable sources", and per WP:Due weight. Academic and popular publishers are not doing this, and most of the media, aside from some cherry-picked examples, is not either. I know that we all want to correct racial injustice, but Wikipedia is not itself for righting great wrongs, nor is it to push a linguistic reform agenda. Crossroads -talk- 19:01, 24 September 2020 (UTC)
  • Update: Two more academic style guides, the AMA Manual of Style [40] and Chicago Manual of Style [41], now capitalize "Black" in an ethnic or racial sense. (AMA also capitalizes "White", while Chicago says "White" may be capitalized in these circumstances.) This is addition to the already-mentioned APA Style [42] and many newsrooms, including the Associated Press [43], the Columbia Journalism Review [44], the Wall Street Journal [45], The New York Times [46], USA Today [47], the Los Angeles Times [48], NBC News (example), and Chicago Tribune [49]. —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 01:18, 26 September 2020 (UTC) (edited 22:11, 17 October 2020 (UTC))
  • Oppose as per many of the arguments above and per WP:Discrimination should the proposal be to capitalise one race and not a different one.--Shakehandsman (talk) 01:53, 26 September 2020 (UTC)
  • Weak oppose: It's definitely complicated. On one hand, many treat Black/White/Brown as an identity, which might alone validate its conversion into a proper noun. On the other hand, all three cases are still generalizations which become fairly absurd when analyzed.
    For "black", not only is there significant genetic diversity still present in Africa, but it is also used for groups like Aboriginal Australians who could be as much as 70,000 years genetically removed from Africa -- moreso than much of Eurasia.
    For "white", although the gap is a bit less wide, in still embodies a wide range of European tribes with genetically diverse features and a frankly arbitrary end point, given the extensive history of Eurasian trade.
    For "brown", aside from being a worldwide catch-all lacking any logical cohesion other than skin color, members of the other two groups have been misidentified as this due to both randomness and the complicated trading of genes within the old world for thousands of years.
At the end of the day, they don't actually identify any cohesive groups as skin color is a spectrum. They do serve as clunky political terms but I'm not entirely convinced that their capitalization in the media is enough to justify capitalization in an encyclopedia. Encyclopedias should be rigid and slow to change, but moreover, immune to political whims. I think Wikipedia should wait about 10 years and see what the rest of the populace does. -- sarysa (talk) 01:13, 28 September 2020 (UTC)
  • You're basically arguing against the concept of race itself, which is well beyond the scope of MoS. Terms like "Black" and "White" may indeed be clunky, but they are used in a wide range of published sources, as well as throughout the encyclopedia, for topics ranging from Black nationalism to Whiteness studies. All we're concerned with is whether the style is appropriate for how the terms are actually used. Unless the terms are describing literal visual color, then they are being used as proper nouns. —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 04:17, 29 September 2020 (UTC)
    Sarysa The use of "black" to describe Indigenous Australians is considered unacceptable these days. The use of "blackfella" or Black by Indigenous people themselves is different, but the term "blacks" is a leftover from colonial days and has dropped out of use. I'm compiling a style guide for use in Australian articles at the moment, based on best practice style guides, but (as commented elsewhere) not sure where it's going to end up yet. Laterthanyouthink (talk) 02:41, 20 November 2020 (UTC)
  • Oppose: For one, Wikipedia is not in the fashion business. The AP makes a change in late summer 2020, and is Wikipedia to ask "how high?". Wikipedia goes by the sources. Right now, you have several hundred years since English diverged from German and ceased to capitalise all nouns. For the time being, some sources have adopted the oddity, and some have not; is Wikipedia about to take sides? This aside from the fact that capitalising "black" is your typical cultural colonialism. Only ignorant Westerners fail to realise that in Africa there are many native ethnic groups: Bantus, Guineans, Aris, Pygmys, Khoisans, Berbers, Arabs, Jews, etc. You see? We capitalise the ethnic group, we don't capitalise the skin color; and it takes supreme cultural imperialism to bunch all these people into an invented "ethnicity" that simply does not exist. XavierItzm (talk) 03:00, 2 October 2020 (UTC)
  • Weak oppose - It's just AP doing this. I don't think we should be following the leader until there's actually a following to consider. Until more WP:RS follow suit, then I'll reconsider my vote. Love of Corey (talk) 04:08, 2 October 2020 (UTC)
  • Support—per the NABJ's style guide: NABJ also recommends that whenever a color is used to appropriately describe race then it should be capitalized, such as Black community, Brown community, White community. I'm not so sure that this is a U.S.-only thing, either: for example Négritude has been fairly frequently capitalized in English going back almost a hundred years, according to the Wiktionary talk page discussion. --‿Ꞅtruthious 𝔹andersnatch ͡ |℡| 04:30, 13 November 2020 (UTC)
  • Oppose - I don't believe this has yet become a majority of US-based RS, but a look at English speaking sources (mainly newspapers and books, I didn't check journals properly) in: the USA, UK, India, Canada, Australia, Kenya, South Africa, Hong Kong and a couple of others in European countries found that, in any case, it was far short of a majority. We are en-wiki, not us-wiki, and so at this time I believe remaining with the status quo on lower-case black/white/brown is correct. It may well change in the next 12 months. There are also a few other areas raised in the discussion (indigenous/Indigenous etc), that a much stronger claim can be made for. Consider me neutral on those at this point. Nosebagbear (talk) 09:55, 17 November 2020 (UTC)
  • Support as a non-American observer and reader, it seems to me as if the tide has turned and Black will continue to be capitalised by most major sources, in reference to African Americans. The case is weak for capitalising "white" because the latter is much more heterogeneous and not regarded as an ethnic group in any sense. Laterthanyouthink (talk) 02:41, 20 November 2020 (UTC)
  • Oppose: capitalize neither as a non-American observer and reader both read as excessive hangovers from the time when it was thought races were actual things with defined immutable characteristics not shades of skin colour with no objective reality. In addition, capital-B-black seems to be a limited-applicability, mainly US alternative to "American American", and "American American" is a not synonymous with "black". I would be indifferent to compound capitalizations like "Black British" or "White American" but in general English does not capitalize adjectives and neither should we. GPinkerton (talk) 18:28, 27 November 2020 (UTC)
  • Support capitalizing both. Ridiculous to capitalize one and not the other, as is being done in an article now. Talk:Shooting_of_Breonna_Taylor#Black_and_white We need a set rule as to what it is to avoid constant edit warring and arguing all over Wikipedia. Dream Focus 23:59, 6 December 2020 (UTC)
  • Closure request notice: Since this has been open for a whopping 169 days (as of this writing), I've asked for formal closure via WP:ANRFC. I think the available options are "capitalize neither", "capitalize both", "capitalize both or neither, per editorial discretion at each article", "capitalize one not the other", or "do whatever (including capitalizing one not the other), per editorial discretion at each article". I don't think any other option has been suggested in the course of the discussion.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  03:08, 8 December 2020 (UTC)

Extended discussion

  • I have to add some detailed observations and analysis to what I've already said. Even as a mostly left-of-center person in the US, I have to keep in mind, as do we all, that this is not US-pedia or LiberalsOnlyPedia. The fact that pretty much zero right-of-center publications (and no, I don't mean conspiracy theorists' fake-news sites, but generally reliable sources) are doing the "Black and Black only" thing matters, more than the average participant on this page would like to admit. So does the fact that most non-US but English-language publications are not drinking any of this excessively selective capitalization Kool-Aid. And for good reason: the central argument in favor of "Black only" is that the African-American experience is uniquely special due to slavery, the US Civil War, Jim Crow, the US civil rights movements, a largely racist Southern culture, programmatic racism in policing and sentencing, etc., etc., all as a combined and very specific socio-historical package (that part is true); and, the argument goes (and this is already a real stretch), this makes Black as a term, in American writing, different from White and Brown and the now-disused Red and Yellow. This argument doesn't port well to Canada or the UK or various other places. And it's a terrible argument anyway. It's a general semantics logic failure, of confusing a label (the term) with qualities of that which is labeled (African Americans and their socio-historical experience). In Korzybsky's terms, this is confusing the map with the territory, mistaking the menu for the meal.

    If you look more deeply into this "only Black" thing, it's an activism-originated and now, to a limited extent, news-writing shift. As the latter, it is largely driven by three (American) journalism forces: AP Stylebook (which many US – but not other – newspapers follow without variance), USA Today (the "least common denominator" US paper, barely more reliable than a tabloid, and rarely divergent from any AP choices), and NYT, which publishes its own (often weird) style guide, but has the same target audience and advertisers as most US papers, and so follows AP on almost all politicized choices. LA Times is in exactly the same boat as NYT (other than their style guide hasn't seen a new edition in print for a very long time).

    The idea is not finding much support among book publishers, journal publishers, and others so far, nor among conservative-leaning news publishers, nor among centrist and even center-left news publishers who think carefully about style rather than just apply AP as a house rule. We know that the mainstream news media in the US (and most of the West) leans heavily leftward, and that it goes out of its way to avoid offending the sensibilities of the left (much more so than it does for the right); their attempts to appease advertisers (the actual primary source of their income) also play heavily into decisions like this. That is, as sources on what do on a heavily socio-politicized style question, they are twice-over not WP:INDY of the subject, but have direct fiduciary rationales for their preferences. Some of them resist it anyway. One example is The Atlantic (which is centrist or slightly left, depending on your definitions); see their editorial (written by a Black professor at NYU, though of Ghanaian-British, not African-American, background) on why it should be Black but also White too [50]. Unsurprisingly, his rationales are consistent with those raised in this discussion already. Reliable sources like Washington Examiner tell us clearly that this shift (for now) among some news organizations is political, and show that it is based on extremely dubious assertions.

    To just pick one, let's start with this doozy from Columbia Journalism Review (which also generally follow's AP's lead): "Black is an ethnic designation; white merely describes the skin color of people who can, usually without much difficulty, trace their ethnic origins back to a handful of European countries". That's just nonsensical in multiple ways, and no cultural anthropologist or ethnologist who wasn't a kook would agree with this assessment. Let's just hit the high points quickly: Ethnicities, cultures, and subcultures are not determined by genealogical accuracy; they are mutable processes of collective acculturation. White does not describe skin color; it's a hand-wavy metaphor, exactly like other ethnic "color terms", including Black, and none of us are literally white or black, we're all part of a range of very pale tan to very dark brown. These terms are likely doomed within a few generations anyway, right along with Red and Yellow. Most White Americans are not from any particular European genetic or cultural background, but are a mishmash of a bunch of them (and often some non-European, too). The areas (mostly West African) from which most African ancestors were brought to the Americas are in fact well-known. This "ease of European-American genealogy" hypothesis a dead distinction now if it ever was one, because genetic tests, for about 20+ years now, can determine exactly where your ancestors came from, including in Africa. It's also meaningless because White and Black modern Americans generally have no direct social or experiential connection to "the old country/countries", unless of recent-immigrant stock (which would also apply to recent African immigrants), or unless they are "background aficionados" (and there are Black ones, too, especially since Alex Haley and others have spurred African Americans from the 1970s onward to investigate their own African ethno-cultural and now genetic backgrounds in detail). Moreover, it's especially meaningless because the dominant White American culture has mostly erased the lines between different European-descended groups in this country (while there are still anti-Semities, most Ashkenazi Jews in the US are part of "White", and there is virtually nothing left of the formerly common discrimination against certain European sub-ethnicities in the US, including Irish, Cornish, and Italian Americans). So, the main reason CJR argues that Black refers to a modern distinct meta-ethnicity in its own right actually has also applied to White in this country since around the late 19th century.

    Next, no sociologist or other kind of social scientist who was not a kook would buy CJR's premise either, for two super-obvious reasons: 1) Most clearly of all, it simply would not be possible for the US to be dominated by a White American group with categorical White privilege, White dialect patterns in their English usage, and White voting, investing, consuming, music-preference, etc., patterns that are clearly identifiable, and so on, if White American, from the late 19th c. onward, were not an "ethnicity" or "ethnic group" in the over-broad sense that Black American or African American is. Indeed, arguing otherwise is basically socio-politically dangerous, as it provides "subconscious White supremacists" an obvious out: "I'm not White, and there is no White privilege, and I'm tired of being called 'White' and blamed for your problems. I'm Irish-Italian-Dutch, and about 2/3 of my own ancestors were discriminated against. So quit whining and just work harder. TANSTAAFL!" I've already occasionally encountered arguments like this my entire life, and they are now more common than ever. But this observation by me may itself be a soapboxy, political point (since it's anti-racialist and is critical of "white grievance" posturing and excuse-making).

    2) European sub-ethnicities like Scottish and Montenegrin and Swedish are not used in the US as classifiers, by the government, by cops, by universities, by financial institutions, or by any other social force that matters, any more than they ask African Americans if they are of Eritrean or Kenyan stock in particular (but note that Asians often are asked to be more specific). It's just a White/Caucasian/European catch-all check box, like African. "African" itself is an over-generalization, since there are Afro-Asiatic (Semitic and Berber) and Turkic peoples also native since antiquity to North Africa, and most of the population of Madagascar is of Maritime Southeast Asian heritage). What our sociological categorizers are really asking is whether someone is of Sub-Saharan African ethnic background (though that, too, is not actually an ethnicity under most definitions; there's more genetic diversity between neighboring groups of Africans than between the Germans and the Okinawans). These sociological "ethnic" grouping classifiers like "White" and "Black" and "Asian" are based not on genetics or culture but geopolitics and its arbitrary labeling. Virtually nothing ever asks if someone is Turkic, for example. If you're a Turkish American, you're expected to identify as white; if your Turkic family background is from a bit more easterly (e.g. Azerbaijani or Turkmeni), you'll end up classified as Middle-Eastern, and if from further east (Uyghur, Kyrgyz) as Asian – which is not any kind of ethnic group at all, but a geographic origin label. At least most of these checkbox lists now split Asian up into subcategories that make a bit more sense (various Indic peoples are more closely related to Europeans, as are most Turkic and Semitic ones, than to East Asians, and Southeast Asians intergrade with Pacific Islanders all the way down to New Guinea and New Zealand).

    The key take-way here is that if anything like the CJR rationale is actually a major factor in some news organizations' and activism organizations' rationales for "Black but white and brown" (and it certainly seems to be, in one wording or another, in most of the "why we're only capitalizing Black" statements I've read), it is patently pseudoscientific on many points, historically inaccurate, based on gross misunderstandings of ethnicity and culture and social forces, and just flat-out counterfactual and irrational nonsense in many places. We have a term for this: WP:FRINGE. Hell, not even all far-left Americans agree this is a good idea, since many were long working on getting publications to write Black, Brown, and White and were already meeting with growing success. So, this is a fringe of a fringe, an internecine faction fight amongst progressives. The way to deal (off-WP or onsite) with a tedious false equivalence like "White and Black Americans are the same, they're just ethnical groupings", which ignores centuries of differential justice and economics along racialized lines, is not to erect a farcical fantasy argument based itself on a whole slew of other false equivalences, irrelevancies, confusion of labels with what they label, and patently false claims. It's to be honest and rational and treat everyone with respect when it comes to labeling/classification. PS: for anyone unclear on why ethnicity and race and ancestry and heritage are themselves hard to even understand and talk about, as if we all mean different things by them sometimes, it's because we do. See WP:Race and ethnicity for a run-down on this, which also includes some historical background on what makes the Black experience in America so different and why the US is unusually fraught with racialism, racism, and related strife. Most importantly, it covers why not to bring that socio-political baggage with you when editing Wikipedia. See also WP:SYSTEMICBIAS and, of course, WP:NPOV.
     — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  04:42, 1 September 2020 (UTC)

    • There are two issues to consider: (1) Is the style used by a substantial majority of reliable sources? (2) Are these sources influential on the style of other publications? Any other concerns are a distraction. Whether the change involves right-of-center...centrist [or] center-left sources is beside the point. We don't have political litmus tests for reliability. The only relevant standard per MOS:CAPS is whether a source has a reputation for fact-checking and accuracy.
      The notion that this is WP:CIRCULAR sourcing makes no sense. There's no evidence that the AP and others are following Wikipedia, since WP does not now generally capitalize "Black" in an ethnic or racial sense. Accounting for English usage in Canada or the UK or various other places seems like an argument for applying the change to US-related subjects only, per MOS:TIES. (It also puts the lie to the notion that this is a left-wing issue; in the UK or Europe the New York Times would be considered centrist or even center-right.)
      The most persuasive argument here against the proposal is that it is not finding much support among book publishers [and] journal publishers. There's no need to muddy the waters with a lot of speculation about sources' reasoning or motives. The idea that the Associated Press and The New York Times, among others, have a financial or legal relationship to the topic of capitalizing/lowercasing "Black" is quite a stretch, and would appliy equally to conservative publications, who also have fiduciary rationales for resisting the change (the idea that the Washington Examiner is particularly reliable is also new to me). In fact, the most prominent conservative news outlet, Fox News, is adopting the change as well, while also capitalizing "White" and "Brown".[51] —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 22:01, 4 September 2020 (UTC) edited 20:51, 7 September 2020 (UTC))
      @Sangdeboeuf: The reason I wrote an embedded essay that touches on so many topics is because the rationales being offered throughout the overall discussion do so, and directly make, or more indirectly rely on material that makes, various dubious assumptions. The answers to your opening questions are clearly "not even close", and "to a limited extent". As for news outlets' fiscal reliance on pleasing their reader and advertiser bases, and the effects that may have on their coverage, fact-checking, stylistic choices, etc., I invite you to spend some time at WP:RSN, where such matters are a frequent source of discussion about right-wing media and their suitability as sources to cite on Wikipedia. Next, it's important not to confuse proper Fox News journalism (which WP generally treats as reliable, "excluding politics and science" – WP:FOXNEWS), and the opinion shows on Fox News, which are ultra-right WP:FRINGE stuff. The fact that the actual news from Fox News is doing "Black and White" (not "white") along with other, much more left-wing outlets including The Atlantic and The Washington Post and the National Association of Black Journalists (a recent change from "black and white" and then, briefly, "Black but white"), and the Diversity Style Guide [52], etc., supports my central argument: "Black but white" is a preference of one faction of the left. Checking WP:RSP, I see that Washington Examiner is considered "no consensus" as to being a reliable source, largely because it's primarily editorial material. But it's reliable for the fact that people in the news industry are observing that the "Black but white" style is a political choice (with a small set of not always consistent, but consistently highly politicized rationales). The fact that they're on the opposite side of the left–right axis from most of those making that choice doesn't magically invalidate the observation. But lots of others have also written about this, including the Journalism Institute of the National Press Club [53], MacArthur Foundation (who are going with "Black and White") [54], D Magazine (ditto) [55], Conscious Style Guide [56], Center for Public Integrity [57], etc., etc.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  02:15, 27 October 2020 (UTC)
  • Per EEng, it would mean that "White" has to be capped. That's a problem. Tony (talk) 00:55, 18 September 2020 (UTC) Ngrams here and here. Tony (talk) 01:01, 18 September 2020 (UTC)
    • Not necessarily. If we follow MOSCAPS we just use the same style as the majority of RSes, which one would be hard-pressed to argue is a problem. And not everyone agrees capitalizing "White" is problematic anyway. The NYT cites the sociologist Eve Ewing as one scholar supporting capital-W "White", because in her words, "'Whiteness is not incidental ... Whiteness is endowed with social meaning ...'" In The Atlantic, philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah addresses the same issue that EEng seems to allude to, saying "If the capitalization of white became standard among anti-racists, [white supremacists’] gesture [of capitalizing 'white'] would ... lose all force". Appiah also quotes this statement from the Center for the Study of Social Policy, which says, "it is important to call attention to White as a race as a way to understand and give voice to how Whiteness functions in our social and political institutions and our communities". And as SMcCandlish pointed out, the U.S. Census Bureau and the influential Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association capitalize both. I myself am agnostic about "White". Just some food for thought. —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 07:48, 25 September 2020 (UTC)
      • I've been following the news in earnest this year, and every single day I see mainstream news sources using black and white, or Black and White, with only a few publishers insisting on Black but white to the point of editorially enforcing it (even among those that made statements in favor of Black but white, various writers at most them do Black and White anyway without being overridden by later editors). In answer to Tony1: Using White is only a problem if it's done alone. In the sense of it as an ethnic/racial name (even an informal one), it is operating as a proper noun, and is not actually descriptive. (Even people with albinism are not literally white, but a very pale off-white.) It it thus operating exactly the same as Black, Brown (in that catchall "everyone but Caucasians" ethno-racial sense), and the now-taboo Red ("the Red man's ways") and Yellow ("the Yellow peril in the Pacific war"). All that's aside from the NPoV concerns of capitalizing one but not the other[s], and there are multiple such concerns (WP siding with a particular socio-politico-linguistic activism cause, WP treating a particular ethnic group with special signification capitals denied to others, etc.). By default MoS would have us use lower case, because reliable sources independent of the subject are not consistently doing one of the three patterns. However, I argue that all of them should be capitalized because of their proper-naming function, and to be WP:CONSISTENT with other racio-ethnic terminology. Either way, those are the only two viable choices. The responses above indicate nothing like a consensus for Black but white.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  03:36, 27 September 2020 (UTC)
        • The use of "Black" is not a SIGCAPS issue when reliable sources use it. MOSCAPS doesn't say to follow the majority of RSes unless they do something you don't agree with like capitalizing only one racial group. It says we follow the majority of reliable sources, full stop. If you want to argue we can't follow reliable sources in this matter because it would impress upon the reader the importance or specialness of something, then you could make the same argument for virtually any capitalized proper noun. As for mainstream news sources, here's a sampling of articles from the past several days that show up near the top of results when you google "black people COVID":
          • NBC News: "the number of Black-owned businesses declined more than 40 percent across the U.S. between February and April, while white-owned businesses declined 17 percent"
          • The Washington Post: "The trust of a first-generation covid-19 vaccine is significantly less among Black Americans compared to White or Hispanic people"
          • Harvard Business Review: "ACE-inhibitors used to treat hypertension, for example, are less effective in Black patients compared to white patients"
          • NPR: "While there may be an uptick in Black people owning guns in the United States today ... The majority of gun owners are white men"
          None of these outlets are lowercasing "black" with regard to race or ethnicitiy. Could you provide some evidence of writers at publications who have announced the change to using "Black" and "white" using Black and White anyway without being overridden by later editors? —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 21:42, 27 September 2020 (UTC)
• BBC: "Now, we're the core and centre of black British music and have been for the past 11 years."
• USA Today: “Union, a black woman, was singled out”
• Financial Times: "Mbali Ntuli, 32, would be only the second black leader in the troubled liberal party’s 20-year history"
• ABC-9: “With the goal to mobilize black men to support racial justice”}}
• The Vanderbilt Hustler: “it is necessary for black students to have a safe space on campus”
• The Guardian: “ Josh talks to black fans, writers and critics about how they view racism”
XavierItzm (talk) 10:21, 4 October 2020 (UTC)
That USA Today quote is not a statement by the author, but a direct quotation from a discrimination complaint filed by the subject of the article. I'm not sure why the rest of these were posted here, since none of them besides USA Today announced that they would capitalize "Black" (and the inclusion of a student newspaper doesn't seem relevant to anything). —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 20:10, 4 October 2020 (UTC)
Plus it's just as easy to cherry-pick a list of counter examples, and it's already clear that the claim that "the majority of RSes" are doing "Black but white" is false. I see "black and white" or "Black and White" every single day (unless I read no news). The Washington Post's apparent new standard (if they have one, or maybe it's just what their writers are doing without any policy) is "Black and White", as one such example. (I provided a bunch more, above, in another later post today.) And even at papers that said they had a new policy of "Black but white", I keep seeing instances of "Black and White" because various writers are not going along with it and editors are either not noticing or not fighting them over it. As I said at Reconstruction era, the fact that they are serving as proper names for major groups of people is meaningful. It's silly and jarring that the article had "South[ern[ers]]", "North[ern[ers]]", "Colored[s]", "Negro[es]", "Republicans", "Democrats", "Southern Democrats", "African Americans", "European Americans", "Baptists", "Union[ists]", "Confedera[cy|tes]", etc., etc., all capitalized, yet the only two names for massive groups of people that were not capitalized were "white[s]" and "black[s]". And even that was not consistent; various editors of the article had been veering back and forth, with "White" and "Black" occurring at random. So I just normalized it all to "Black" and "White", based on the proper-naming-consistency logic I just laid out, and on this discussion very clearly not coming to a consensus to use "Black but white". (And that edit has stuck, so far, along with a bunch of other cleanup I did, mostly of inconsistent citations and dates and such.)  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  16:30, 26 October 2020 (UTC); rev'd. 02:15, 27 October 2020 (UTC)

@SMcCandlish: I read the news every day, and I have never seen "White" (unless combined with a proper noun) and I seldom see "Black", and only in relation to America (that is, the US). All, or almost all, the examples quoted "South[ern[ers]]", "North[ern[ers]]", "Colored[s]", "Negro[es]", "Republicans", "Democrats", "Southern Democrats", "African Americans", "European Americans", "Baptists", "Union[ists]", "Confedera[cy are again American-only terms. North and South are capitalized because they have specific meanings in the US context which is different from non-American, non-capitalized usages, and as a result the demonyms relating to these social groups are likewise capitalized. Ditto for words flowing from the geographical proper nouns "Africa", "Americas", and "Europe", those relating to political or religious persuasions like Baptism (note the need to distinguish from "baptism" and "baptists") and "Democrats" (note again distinction between supporters of "Democratic Party" and "democracy") and those relating to various nationalities and ethnicities like, say: "Red Ruthenians" or "White Huns" (note again not "Huns that are white"). "Republicans" (a meaningless political label no different from "Team Red") has a different meaning to "republicans", and the argument that because an adjective refers to a group of people it should be capitalized is not valid, or else anyone supporting the constitutional situation described by the term "republic" could be described as "Republican", which is obviously not the case. "Colored" (in US contexts) and "Coloured" (in South African contexts, like the Cape Coloureds) were/are defined political-official categories foremost, with meanings specific to their capitalized forms which are different to their non-capitalized forms. (In contexts of historical segregationist societies like these, capitalization of the three segregated groups (viz. whites, coloreds, and coloureds) There really isn't any reason to dignify sweeping generalizations based on skin colour with the status of proper nouns; this is exactly the kind of pigeonholing and emphasis on basically trivial characteristics that one should seek to avoid. There are undoubtedly contexts where capitalizing is appropriate, ("Black hair" is different to "black hair") but I am strongly opposed to enforcing the promotion of what should be an adjectival description into a proper noun label across the project. (Risking whataboutism here but) would the same rationale extend to the forms "Disabled" or "Women"? The capitalization introduces the potential for unwelcome "Othering" and in the text gives undue visual weight to what should be ordinary descriptive words, in my view. GPinkerton (talk) 19:26, 27 November 2020 (UTC)

@GPinkerton: See above for already-cited news sources using "Black and White", as well as "black and white" of course, and we know there's a new trend of "Black but white". The world is not consistent on this, so it's up to editorial consensus what WP should do. It's clear from this overall thread that there is not going to be a consensus to use "Black but white", for WP:NPOV reasons. The MoS default on everything is to use lower case when sources are not consistent, unless there's some other reason to capitalize. I'm suggesting that there is: these terms are serving as proper names, even if they're loosey-goosey overgeneralizing ones, and specific to certain cultural contexts. It's jarring to have things like "Asian, black, Latino, white, and Pacific Islander populations" in our text, as if two ethnical groups are some how "lesser" or "demoted". It's just going to cause problems. The very fact that this keeps coming up (long before 2020) proves that. "Black and White" is not a neologistic practice by any means; it's been a common style in English since at least the mid-20th century, probably longer (I didn't go back all that far when digging around, since how people wrote in the Roaring '20s or whenever isn't really relevant to what we should do now.).

I'm really not making any more complicated an argument than that. (And I would support "black and white" as second choice; just not "Black but white".) There's a convention in English to capitalize ethnic names/labels. There is absolutely not such a convention with regard to genders, or to ability/disability classes, so a comparison to those is a reductio ad absurdum. Coloured in the African context is conventionally capitalized, while Negro mostly was when it was current, though usage varied more for the American sense of Colored (which has a very different meaning from the African term), but capitalization of that was also very common. The fact that some of them have US-specific meanings isn't germane; Aboriginal has a special meaning in Australia (also an ethno-racial label), and it is capitalized. There are other such examples, and they're consistent. The only inconsistencies in the pattern are black and white. If you don't think Black and White (along with Hispanic/Latino, Native American, etc.) aren't "defined political-official categories" in the US then you must not live there. These labels are used for official purposes in many ways (census categories, minority grant and scholarship availability, etc.). Similar things seem to apply in various other places, though with different nuances (I'm told the UK tends to be more specific, and distinguishes often between people of Caribbean vs. direct-African descent, but they also definitely do use Black a lot.) If "There are undoubtedly contexts where capitalizing is appropriate", then it should just be capitalized, the end, per MOS:ARTCON and MOS:SIGCAPS.

This isn't about "dignifying" racialism; hell, I wrote WP:Race and ethnicity. It's about the function of the words in the sentence, and the problem of not capitalizing those two when all other such terms are. It becomes a PoV problem in and of itself, from the readers' perspective, regardless of editorial intent. The argument I sometimes see along the lines of "but I don't wanna capitalize in White supremacy" is absurd. We capitalize in neo-Nazi, etc. The problem would be in writing White Supremacy and Neo-Nazi, turning the entire phrases into "proper names" (against MOS:DOCTCAPS, regardless of topic) rather than just capitalizing the proper names within those phrases. In an ideal world, Black and White would get "retired" just like lots of old ethno-racial labels (Orientals, the Red Man, etc.). But it has not happened yet, and we have to write for the real-world readership. This is a "WP is not for language-change activism" matter both coming and going; neologistic practice is one extreme of it, and hyper-traditionalist no-caps-for-either resistance is the other.
[PS: Sorry if some of this is repetitive of previous posts; I've been cooking and going back and forth from the kitchen, and it would take a really long time to re-read this entire thread. On the up-side, I have discovered that adding a bit of chipotle to gumbo or jambalaya, while not exactly traditional, is marvelous.]
 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  04:29, 28 November 2020 (UTC)

@SMcCandlish: I think your argument is misplaced on two massive points. 1.) English does not capitalise "ethnic" words as you say, and when in former days people were described as red, yellow, and brown upper case was not used (though extraneous capitalization has always been popular on the US. There's no reason to capitalize "oriental". "Latino", like "Negro", is an adaptation of a Spanish word that can be capitalised or not capitalized, as preferred. As you say, "colored" needn't be capitalized either but often was for contextual reasons. "Pacific Islander" only needs to be capitalized to distinguish between people from islands in the Pacific Ocean and other islanders that are pacific. "Native American" must be distinguished from individuals personally native to the United States. 2.) Neither "black" nor "white" are ethnicities or races. There is no real category to which "Black" can universally refer except "heterogeneous non-white peoples with blackish skin". Nothing except skin colour connects the black Australian Aborigines with the black people of Brazil. Similarly, nothing except skin colour connects Afghans with Irishmen, and there is no common ethnicity to which both people could be attached and dignified with a capitalized proper name. Likewise "Asian" is not an ethnicity: there is no common ethnicity to which both Thais and Iraqis and Caucasians belong, and the reason "Asian" is capitalized is because it derives from a proper noun, Asia. Also, I think you may have read the situation in Britain incorrectly; "Afro-Carribean" is sometimes used to distinguish (descendants of) black Africans from other black- or dark-skinned ethic groups from elsewhere in the world, like New Guineans or Melanesians. The news sources adduced as evidence deal with the US perspective, which has peculiar and non-universal attitudes to race and terminology. I'd like to see explicit evidence non-African-American black people referred to as "Black" and non-European-Americans referred to as "White". Calling non-capitalization of both colour adjectives"hyper-traditional", rather than just "common sense", "normal", or "non-political" is jumping the gun by a long shot. All (non-American) media I consume use lowercase letters for adjectives, including adjectives relating to perceived skin colour. Again, the "defined social-political categories" of the US are arbitrary and peculiar to that small fraction of the world's population, and are themselves not based on objective characteristics but socially-defined norms inapplicable outside America. In Europe, the concept of "latino" does not exist, and "Hispanic" is not any kind of racial classification, as it in the US; Spain, to European eyes, is a "white" country, but "Hispanics" in the US are usually considered "non-white". Shoehorning all the world into two categories based on skin colour and dubbing them with proper nouns promoted out of simple adjectives is fundamentally unhelpful in my view, and falls into the old category-errors of the (more) racialized past. GPinkerton (talk) 12:13, 28 November 2020 (UTC)
That claim simply isn't true, though. "The Red man", "the Yellow peril", etc. were frequently capitalized, as was "Oriental" (and still is in the few narrow contexts it retains currency, mostly in its original sense referring to roughly furthest-Eastern Europe though the Middle East to Western Asia [i.e. what used to be the Ottoman Empire]: "Oriental rugs", "Orientalist art", etc.). The fact that they were not always capitalized is irrelevant. (Lots of things WP and other high-quality works capitalize as proper names are mis-lowercased in lower-register writing. Also, various racist writers refused, in their day, to capitalize any term that pertained to the group now usually called African Americans, despite the fact that "Colored", "Negro", etc. were often capitalized by others without such agendas.) English capitalizes virtually all names for ethnic groups (under any definition of ethnic, even a stupid one), even when they originated as descriptors not usual proper names (examples: Native Americans, First Nations, Aboriginal Australians; but not "native South Africans", "indigenous peoples of Mexico", and other descriptors that have not become stock labels, i.e. names). Again, see WP:Race and ethnicity: whether "race" is even a thing at all beyond a social construct is dubious, and whether what the average shopkeeper thinks is an "ethnicity" agrees with anthropological definitions is immaterial to the style question: they are being used as proper names. Something does not have to be real or true to have a proper name (e.g. Uruk-Hai, Piltdown Man).

You're arguing from a position of "This idea is bad, so we should use style tricks to denigrate that point of view." WP simply does not work that way. I'm not going to continue going in circles on this. I've said my piece, and you have too, and that is sufficient. Especially since a review of your user talk page shows it to be a firehose of warnings and sanctions for disruption, especially in "human group conflict" topics. Anyone with in this much trouble centered on "your people vs. my people" conflicts is not likely to provide very useful input into how WP should write about much matters.
 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  17:03, 28 November 2020 (UTC)

It is true, though. Of the eight examples of usage for that sense of "red man, n." in the Oxford English Dictionary, between 1740 and 2003, only two have capitalized "red" and both are 18th century; all the more modern examples are lower case. Similarly, the same dictionary's entry on "yellow peril, n." also suggests lower case was more prevalent between 1895 and 2006, with fourteen examples and only two instances capitalized. Likewise, "oriental, n." (NB headword in lowercase in all instances) and "oriental rug, n." are not generally capitalized, and the editors even note: "Use of oriental in this sense to designate a person is now usually avoided" (NB case). GPinkerton (talk) 22:37, 29 November 2020 (UTC)
Been over this already several times. No one ever argued that any of these terms were always capitalized. The entire point of this discussion is that they are sometimes capitalized, so it is obviously not wrong to do so. Lower-casing has often been done with specific intent, and even more with general and oblivious effect, of pejorative implication. Lower-casing "black" and "white" produces (in proximity to capitalized ethno-racial terms like "Latino", "Asian", etc.) a strong impression for the reader that the groups labeled with the lower-case terms are being denigrated. This problem does not magically go away just because you don't prefer the obvious solution.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  03:16, 8 December 2020 (UTC)

References

References

  1. ^ https://www.poynter.org/reporting-editing/2020/many-newsrooms-are-now-capitalizing-the-b-in-black-here-are-some-of-the-people-who-made-that-happen/
  2. ^ https://blog.ap.org/announcements/the-decision-to-capitalize-black
  3. ^ https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/05/insider/capitalized-black.html
  4. ^ https://www.foxnews.com/media/fox-news-media-capitalize-black
  5. ^ https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/media/why-hundreds-of-american-newsrooms-have-started-capitalizing-the-b-in-black/2020/06/18/7687a7a8-b16e-11ea-8f56-63f38c990077_story.html
  6. ^ https://talkingbiznews.com/they-talk-biz-news/wsj-is-now-capitalizing-black/. {{cite web}}: Missing or empty |title= (help)
  7. ^ https://www.cjr.org/analysis/capital-b-black-styleguide.php. {{cite web}}: Missing or empty |title= (help)
  8. ^ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/06/time-to-capitalize-blackand-white/613159/
The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Institutions, Commitee and Commission

There's an issue at Talk:Greek case#Capitalizing common nouns that may result in changes to MOS:INSTITUTIONS to include when we don't apply Wikipedia style to sourced material. -- JHunterJ (talk) 14:25, 14 December 2020 (UTC)

Discussion at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Fraternities and Sororities § Capitalization question

 You are invited to join the discussion at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Fraternities and Sororities § Capitalization question. -- Marchjuly (talk) 01:18, 22 December 2020 (UTC)

Slogans

Should "[v]ictory or death" be capitalized in the following sentence on Ali Alexander? I think it should not be, because it's a phrase, not a proper noun. Nightscream, per Special:Diff/1000375775, thinks that it should be. AleatoryPonderings (???) (!!!) 21:14, 14 January 2021 (UTC)

The Guardian named Alexander as among the people active in inciting the crowd outside the Capitol that day, leading chants of "Victory or death".
Doesn't seem to be a proper noun, doesn't even seem to fall into the grey area of an "official slogan" of a company or organization. Looks to me like it lands squarely in the realm of "unnecessary capitalization". Primergrey (talk) 20:25, 15 January 2021 (UTC)
However, if it is being presented as a quoted statement, capping the first word, I think, is an option. Primergrey (talk) 20:28, 15 January 2021 (UTC)
Agreed. Here, it's being presented as a phrase that people were repeating. If it were presented as a quoted personal-statement sentence, it would be different: J. Q. Pubblik, just before before being shot by the Elbonian dictator's guards, shouted "Victory or Death!" And, yeah, people will argue about whether there should be a colon (or comma) before the quote because it's technically a full sentence, under some definitions of "sentence"; I tend not to use one when it's so short and it flows that naturally.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  05:40, 10 February 2021 (UTC)

Capitalisation and lists

Let me preface this by saying this is a somewhat niche case, though it could extend to other similar items in concept.

As far as I can tell, the concept of a fully capitalised list is not covered within this guideline. The item that comes closest to it is the All Caps section, but even within that there is no specification of a case. The reason I bring this up is in reference to Port Adelaide Honour Board. It is currently represented in full caps, having been edited this way as a representation of the club's own honour board. I've been directed to open a discussion in reference to this, and believe that a clear indication of lists should be covered under the guideline in some capacity. Empoleonmaster23 (talk) 03:34, 31 December 2020 (UTC)

Port Adelaide Football Club may format their own list on the walls of their club or on their website in whatever way they prefer, but if it's a list on Wikipedia, it would be formatted in accordance with Wikipedia's Manual of Style. So, almost always, lists would be in sentence case. SchreiberBike | ⌨  04:29, 31 December 2020 (UTC)
No worries. It was worth bringing it up as I couldn't clearly see it falling into the list category alone, nor really anything else, so it was worth investigating what to do in this situation. Thanks! Empoleonmaster23 (talk) 05:06, 31 December 2020 (UTC)
There's no reason that lists or any other "thing" would be exempt from a rule to not use SCREAMING ALL-CAPS, unless there were a line item at MOS:ALLCAPS making such an explicit exception. Anyway, the article is not presently using an all-caps list. However, the list was auto-collapsing, and this is not permissible for accessibility reasons; see MOS:DONTHIDE. If the thought is that the contents of the list are too much for that article, the WP:SPLIT to a new article.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  17:02, 3 April 2021 (UTC)

Degree courses

The project page says: "fields of academic or professional study are not capitalized". Does this include the titles of academic subjects, such as undergraduate degree courses and qualifications, e.g. Classics, Human Geography, Economics, Medieval English Literature, etc.? If it is meant to include these, should this be made a little clearer? If I saw a degree qualification, such as any one of these, in lower case, on someone's curriculum vitae, I'd think they were careless. I have always assumed they are proper nouns. Martinevans123 (talk) 10:51, 19 March 2021 (UTC)

The Oxford Style Manual (2003 edn, §4.1.17) covers this as follows:

Capitalize the names of academic subjects only in the context of courses and examinations: "He wanted to study physics, he read Physics, sat the Physics examination, and received a degree in Physics, thereby gaining a physics degree."

In other words, not dissimilar to the republican/Republican distinction already given as an example in our guideline. Per the OSM, one should therefore write "he read Physics at Oxford" [the course], but "he studied physics at Oxford" [the subject]. That may be too subtle a distinction for some. GrindtXX (talk) 16:18, 19 March 2021 (UTC)
No, WP doesn't capitalize in that way. That's a rather strange Oxfordism, and the habit of doing that is why MoS has a section saying not to do it. That is, no one was ever writing "the Physics of billiard balls is complex" or "She attributed their long marriage to good personal Chemisty". These terms were only ever being over-capitalized as academic subjects/research fields. And it's not at all like the republican/Republican distinction. A more apt comparison there would be a "school" or department within a university that has a unique proper name (e.g. "Jones School of Law at the University of Elbonia", directly analogous the proper name "Republican Party of Elbonia"). If it had a generic name like "Law School" or "Department of Physics", just use lower case: "the University of Elbonia law school" or "the law school of the University of Elbonia". The central rule of MOS:CAPS is generally to not capitalize anything that can reasonably be lower-cased. If there's an exception, it'll be enumerated specifically. Here, we have an "un-exception" that is specifically enumerated the other direction: "fields of academic or professional study are not capitalized". A more specific proper title of a course would be capitalized, e.g. "Introduction to Physics II (PHYS-102)", but its uncommon for us to ever write about them. That's more often going to show up in a primary-source citation to an online course syllabus, which should be replaced with a better source. PS: "received a degree in Physics, thereby gaining a physics degree" would be so confusing that the heads of readers and editors alike would asplode.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  12:59, 3 April 2021 (UTC)
Ah yes, asplode. Or else maybe just read on without a single second thought. If I went onto any UK university today and saw "Department of physics" on a door, I'd be quite gobsmacked and would assume it had just been awarded an enormous Wikipedia bursary. I would suggest that a sentence such as "She read Human Geography at St Cuthbert's Society, Durham University" would be seen as 100% normal by most native English readers in the UK. Martinevans123 (talk) 13:15, 3 April 2021 (UTC)
Why would a door ever have a sign reading "Department of physics"? That's not typical signage style, which is mostly Title Case Like This (when it's not all-caps). I think you're maybe trying some kind of reductio ad absurdum or slippery-slope argument. But, no, the sky is not going to fall. And virtually every style choice we're faced with here is – on both (or sometimes more than two) sides – completely normal to various large groups of people. We will never, ever need to have an MoS rule to not write sentences in the form "tHe cOMPANY cLOSED iN 2021.", to not spell "television" as "televizhun", to not use ,,doubled commas,, as quotation marks, or to not give dates in the form "3 2021 April", since these things are not normal to anyone. "It's normal to me" isn't an argument against an MoS rule, but reason there should be one, if some are prone to repetitively argue with other editors about how to write something, until a rule stops those arguments.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  19:41, 3 April 2021 (UTC); copyedited 15:52, 6 April 2021 (UTC)
So you'd know the way in. Thanks. Martinevans123 (talk) 10:33, 4 April 2021 (UTC) p.s. some people still get printed degree certificates that have Physics spelled with a capital P. Unless they work or intend to work in televizhun, of course.
LOL. I meant "Why would it not read 'Department of Physics' like any other signage?" Certificates: Sure, that's title case (heading style). And if it's also done mid-sentence on one, that's just capitalization for emphasis/signification, which is very common in legalese, bureaucratese, business/marketing/PR copy, signage, manuals and documentation, field guides, and various other forms of writing.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  15:52, 6 April 2021 (UTC)
Yes. Very common in universities too. But hey, what do they know. Martinevans123 (talk) 15:54, 6 April 2021 (UTC)
Department names are names and when used as department names should be capitalized, just like any other proper noun phrase. We don't write "United states" merely because the country is composed of states and "state" is also a common English word with the same meaning. Fields of study, used in their common meaning as fields of study, should not be capitalized. Endowed professorships typically have proper names, and when that name includes a field it would be capitalized. So, the following are all correct: "professor of physics in the Department of Physics, University of Oxford" (the linked title is a proper noun phrase, but "professor of physics" are just used as common English words); "Chancellor's Professor of physics at the University of California, Irvine" (at UCI, the "Chancellor's Professor" title is a proper noun, but officially does not include the discipline, and "of physics" is a discipline rather than the department name, which is "Department of Physics & Astronomy"); Cavendish Professor of Physics (the linked title is a proper noun phrase which does include the discipline in the title). The only complication here is that "department of physics" could also be used as a non-name, to refer to a department that specializes in physics but not to refer to it by name (possibly because its actual name is something else like "Henry A. Rowland Department of Physics and Astronomy", the one at Johns Hopkins). —David Eppstein (talk) 19:59, 17 April 2021 (UTC)
"Chancellor's Professor of Physics"-style unique titles (often endowments) were already covered, as capitalized, either here or at MOS:BIO, but we seem to have lost that. I'm pretty sure that the real-world example it provided was "the Alfred Fitler Moore Professor of Electrical and Systems Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania". There's rarely any need to use such strings except in the person's own bio. And they come up infrequently enough that maybe MoS doesn't need a line-item about it. I mean, it's been who knows how long without anyone noticing the item went missing.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  08:35, 3 May 2021 (UTC)

Irrelevant text in Personal names and Place names sections

It seems that almost none of the text in the Personal names section and none of the text in the Place names section is related to capitalisation. Am I missing something? Should it be moved to the relevant guideline page and/or deleted? —  AjaxSmack  08:18, 18 April 2021 (UTC)

That's probably another artifact of the merger of what was WP:Manual of Style/Proper names into WP:Manual of Style/Capital letters for the most part (because most of MOS:PN was about capitalization). There's some of it that has needed to re-merge elsewhere, like to MOS:BIO, MOS:TITLES, etc. You've probably just identified more of that mis-placed MOS:PN stuff. I'll look over it soon, unless someone else wants to beat me to it (though I've been doing almost all the merge, consolidation, and cross-referencing work on MoS stuff for a long time now, since it's not sexy enough to attract anyone else's labor, and its easy to break things if you don't know all the material in all the affected pages very well).  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  08:28, 3 May 2021 (UTC)
I've put merge tags on them, to Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Biography, and Wikipedia:Manual of Style#Geographical items, respectively.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  09:02, 3 May 2021 (UTC)
And WT:MOS and WT:MOSBIO have been notified of this discussion.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  09:10, 3 May 2021 (UTC)

Presocratic vs presocratic vs pre-Socratic at article Pre-Socratic philosophy

Hi all, I 'd like to request your assistance and advice at Pre-socratic philosophy. Which version of the word "presocratic" should we be using in the article. Almost all RS are using the word "Presocratic". I feel it is common sense we follow their lead. Or should we follow MOS guidance which in that case would be "pre-Socratic" or "presocratic"? Please have a look at the talk page. Pinging @Teishin:, who pointed to this talk page when discussing the issue at Talk Page. Cinadon36 13:29, 17 May 2021 (UTC)

This would appear to belong in the discussion above on this page about other, similar problems associated with capitalizing terms in Greek philosophy. [58]. Teishin (talk) 13:36, 17 May 2021 (UTC)
I would prefer to discuss this separately, as it will be easier to reach a consensus because it is a less complicated issue and somewhat different. Cinadon36 13:45, 17 May 2021 (UTC)
I don't see the issues here to be any different from those with, for example, Neopythagoreanism or Neoplatonism or Middle Platonism. Teishin (talk) 14:05, 17 May 2021 (UTC)
There is a hyphen involved but most importantly, I am not here to solve this issue. I feel you are dragging me into a question you asked some months ago and is still pending. The discussion above is about fixing the guideline, I am only interested in finding a solution for the article, since it is awaiting a GA evaluation.Cinadon36 14:16, 17 May 2021 (UTC)
The issue isn't about the hypen. You're bringing up the same issue in pre-Socratic philosophy that I brought up above. According to MOS, we must use "presocratic" or "pre-Socratic" despite the fact that the literature on the subject almost entirely uses "Presocratic" or "Pre-Socratic". The "solution" for the article at this point is MOS:DOCTCAPS. Teishin (talk) 16:56, 17 May 2021 (UTC)
No, when the MOS tells us to ignore what RS are doing, we ignore the MOS. Srnec (talk) 01:22, 20 May 2021 (UTC)
Srnec regarding this issue, reliable sources are inconsistent. Various publishers have a variety of style guides. Teishin (talk) 02:42, 20 May 2021 (UTC)
They are not inconsistent about capitalizing Presocratic. The standard atop the page is "consistently capitalized in a substantial majority of independent, reliable sources." That's what we have here. Srnec (talk) 03:57, 20 May 2021 (UTC)

I don't understand the problem. The MOS as quoted above includes "unless the name derives from a proper name". Socrates is a proper name, and both pre-Socratic and Presocratic are very common in sources compared to Pre-Socratic and presocratic. Sources and the MOS agree that a capital letter is needed. Pick one. Dicklyon (talk) 04:56, 20 May 2021 (UTC)

Overhauling MOS:CAPS#Peoples and their languages

When we (well, mostly I) merged away WP:Manual of Style/Proper names after a 2018 proposal to do so, the content ended up in MOS:CAPS, MOS:TM, MOS:BIO, MOS:TITLES, and the main MoS page. That was mostly done pretty well, except we ended up with WP:Manual of Style/Capital letters#Peoples and their languages containing nothing but a single sentence (on an obscure matter), nothing about capitalization, and no advice that people are actually likely to ever be looking for. I'm pretty sure I noticed this at the time and meant to do something about it, but then other stuff intervened.

I've taken a stab at codifying actual consensus-in-practice, as best I can summarize it, in the following:

Peoples and their languages
See also: Wikipedia:Naming conventions (languages)

Terms for peoples and cultures, languages and dialects, nationalities, ethnic and religious groups, and the like are capitalized, including in adjectival forms (Japanese cuisine, Cumbrian dialect). Cultural terms may lose their capitalization when their connection to the original culture has been lost (or there never really was one). Some fairly conventionalized examples are french fries, typographical romanization, english (cue-ball spin) in pool playing, scotch-doubles tournament, and gum arabic. Some are more transitional and can be written either way: latinization of names, dutch date, and russian roulette. Always capitalized: French cuisine, cultural Romanization, English billiards, Scotch whisky, Arabic coffee, liturgical Latinization, Dutch oven. Avoid over-capitalizing adjectival forms of such terms in other languages, most of which do not capitalize as much as English does. E.g., the book title Diccionario biográfico español ('Spanish Biographical Dictionary') does not capitalize the e of español. If in doubt, check how multiple high-quality reliable sources in English treat the name or phrase.

Combining forms are also generally capitalized where the proper name occurs: (pan-Celticism, Austro-Hungarian, un-American). Some may be fully fused and decapitalized if the name is mid-word; e.g., unamerican, panamerican, transatlantic, and antisemitism are well-attested. There is no consensus on Wikipedia for or against these forms. However, prefer anti-Semitism in close proximity to other such terms (Tatarophobia, etc.), else the lower-casing of Semitic may appear pointed and insulting. Similarly, for consistency within the article, prefer un-American and pan-American in an article that also uses anti-American, pan-African, and similar compounds. (See also WP:Manual of Style § US and U.S. for consistency between country abbreviations.)

Where a common name in English encompasses both a people and their language, that term is preferred, as in Swahili people and Swahili language rather than Waswahili and Kiswahili.

For eponyms more broadly, see WP:Manual of Style § Eponyms.

Some of this could be shunted into footnotes, though I don't think it's overly long. I don't think I've missed anything important here (other than see the thread immediately above this one), nor said anything that is just a random opinion and not reflected in actual practice across our articles, and also sometimes subject to various previous discussions, e.g. I was recently informed that "anti-Semitism" vs. "antisemitism" has been the subject of repeated RfCs, RMs, etc., and without a consensus to demand/reject either spelling. Finally, I've also tried to cross-reference the other material that most closely relates to this, including MOS:EPONYM, MOS:FOREIGNTITLE, MOS:ARTCON, and MOS:US, plus integrating an example from MOS:CONFUSED. The thread above (#Discussion about capitalisation of Black (people)) and the request to summarize the recent RfC in this MOS:CAPS section is what inspired this fix-it work, since the section as it stood was so faulty that adding such an RfC summary in there might seem a confusing non sequitur.
 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  06:17, 5 February 2021 (UTC)

On first reading I like it. Tony (talk) 04:18, 13 February 2021 (UTC)
SMcCandlish, that kind of whisky doesn't have an "e". GPinkerton (talk) 16:02, 13 February 2021 (UTC)
Seriously! I'm surprised BarrelProof hasn't jumped on that! But what about Scotch-like whisky made in Japan, or India? Is the e optional? No, looks like the e is only in the US. So maybe it's just an Engvar thing, not a whisky type thing? Dicklyon (talk) 16:49, 13 February 2021 (UTC)
Fixed! I'd forgotten that (I quit drinking years ago, so my whisk[e]y and beer-related mental storehouse of terminological trivia is dissolving, like ice in Scotch.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  17:53, 13 February 2021 (UTC)
Dicklyon, WhiskVar: Irish and US has an e; Scotch never. Other countries usually follow the style their emulating: Japanese Scotch no e. GPinkerton (talk) 18:16, 13 February 2021 (UTC)
Ah, I should have checked Irish! Dicklyon (talk) 07:29, 14 February 2021 (UTC)
"ligurgical Latin"? Shouldn't that be "liturgical Latin"? Or is this a specialized term I'm not familiar with? (Honest question, I could see it existing.)--Khajidha (talk) 12:23, 16 February 2021 (UTC)
Fixed. Ligurgical Latin is what you speak after too much whisk[e]y.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  13:25, 28 February 2021 (UTC)
"Going twice ...." Are there any concerns about this wording or its placement? I would like to proceed with this, since it's very undesirable to have a section in a guideline purporting to be relevant and to provide guidance but failing to do either.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  08:22, 18 March 2021 (UTC)
The sentence "Terms for peoples and cultures, languages and dialects, nationalities, ethnic and religious groups, and the like are capitalized" seems to conflict with the decision that "Black" and "White" are not necessarily capitalized, as these are "terms for peoples." I would like to see how the language on "color labels" will be incorporated into this section. Qzekrom (she/her • talk) 17:06, 28 March 2021 (UTC)
@Qzekrom: That's covered in #Wording proposal on ethnic/racial terms, in light of the recent RfC, above. I'll have to pore over that again to see it there were objections, revision suggestions, etc., but I think what I drafted is more or less what would get added, though maybe I can think of ways to compress it. Keep in mind that the impetus to revise that section of MoS entirely (as discussed in this talk-page section) was that the material discussed in that prior talk page section had no clear place to "live"; it's what made us notice that this guideline section is basically a broken remnant of an old merge and needs overhauling. So, there is certainly no intent to use this talk section to end-run around the section above; quite the opposite.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  12:18, 3 April 2021 (UTC)
Well, I must be getting senile. I actually already implemented this passage, as MOS:PEOPLANG, back on 5 February. So, all that remains is putting in the material from above, which has no objections other than one person basically wished the RfC had concluded with a "never capitalize" result, which it did not.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  18:16, 3 April 2021 (UTC)
Ok, it is merged in now.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  19:17, 3 April 2021 (UTC)
Great! Qzekrom (she/her • talk) 19:40, 3 April 2021 (UTC)
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