AcaWiki:Sentence case titles

This article is a proposed guideline. Please discuss it on its talk page.

All summaries in AcaWiki are listed as in the main namespace with the title of the article being summarized as the page name. All page/summary/article names in AcaWiki should be described using sentence case according to the APA style guide.

• The first word of each article title should be capitalized. (Due to a limitation in Mediawiki, this is unavoidable).
• The first word after a colon (:), period or full stop (.), or question mark (?) should be capitalized.[1]
• Proper nouns (e.g., the name of the a person or country, etc) should be capitalized.
• All title should be described with their full titles (including subtitles, if available). If a paper is well known under an alternate shorter name (e.g., The strength of weak ties, a redirect should be created from the shorter title to the full title of the article. (This will help cut down on the need to disambiguate articles even in the long term.)
• No other words should be capitalized.

Rationale

Article names should be consistently capitalized for several reasons:

• MediaWiki is case sensitive and there is no easy way to fix this.
• We should promote as much hyper-linking as possible between articles and summaries in AcaWiki. To make this easier, AcaWiki editors should only need to know the name of an article or summary they want to link to.
• Journals, style manuals, and journal search engines use a mix of sentence case and title case when reproducing the titles of academic articles. There is no standard.
  • We should not be expected to have to know how a journal or a person sharing an article chose to capitalize the sentence or look it up before linking to an article.
• We should not have to add redirects for alternate capitalizations for every article shared on the site.

Because sentence case preserves information about whether a word in a proper noun or not, it is the best option in that it is less "lossy" than title case.[2] It is also the standard used by Google Scholar in their reporting of results and by the APA Style Manual.

Implementation

At the moment, AcaWiki articles titles are a mix and use a number of different capitalization schemes.

The following steps should be taken to implement this policy.

• A list of all articles named using title case or otherwise with incorrect capitalization should be created.
• All articles should be moved. Redirects from the old articles should be created
• The upload template should be modified to mention that articles should be in sentence case with a link to this page.