Talk:Greek case

Lead
it feels like a noun is missing in the first line explaining what the Greek case was. Like: The Greek case was a resolution/application/statute brought by Denmark... Yoninah (talk) 22:22, 17 September 2020 (UTC)
 * It was a case (as in court case), but that's redundant. (t &#183; c)  buidhe  02:46, 18 September 2020 (UTC)

Article title
According to WP:AT, "Generally, article titles are based on what the subject is called in reliable sources." What do the reliable sources say?
 * Bates 2010: "The 'Greek' case, as it became known, is one of the most famous cases in the... "
 * Becket 1970: in running text, the Greek Case
 * Routledge book: the Greek case
 * Pedaliu 2020: the Greek Case but in 2016 she put it as "the ‘Greek case’" 10.1080/07075332.2016.1141308
 * Dickson 2010: the Greek case
 * Clark 2010: The Greek case, at the beginning of a sentence
 * Another scholarly book: the Greek case
 * Yet another RS book: the Greek case
 * Fernandez 2017: the Greek case

It seems to me that only a minority of sources treat it according to the rules that would apply if this were a formal title, "The Greek Case", as you keep insisting. According to article titles policy, "words are not capitalized [after the first one] unless they would be so in running text". Also, the article is about the entire case, from admissibility, investigation etc, of which the report was only a part. Quite unlike an article about a novel or scholarly monograph, which in almost every case is much more about the finished work rather than the process. (t &#183; c)  buidhe  19:33, 24 October 2020 (UTC)
 * Yeah, definitely not "the Greek Case". This is essentially the same kind of thing as terms for military conflicts, social movements, disasters, and other events.  WP doesn't capitalize them unless and until sources overwhelmingly treat one of them having become conventionalized as a proper name, and near-consistently capitalize it.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  04:08, 1 January 2021 (UTC)

Capitalizing common nouns
Wikipedia doesn't capitalize common nouns like "committee" and "commission", even when used to refer to specific committees or commissions. See MOS:INSTITUTIONS. -- JHunterJ (talk) 17:43, 12 December 2020 (UTC)

I don't know about other commissions but in this case, Commission, Court, and Convention are universally capitalized by sources: I'm more pro-MOS than many editors I know but I can't support using a format that isn't used by any sources. I believe that this capitalization is a convention in law-related sources, and it is also the one used by Strasbourg organs. (t &#183; c)  buidhe  17:56, 12 December 2020 (UTC)
 * "As we shall see in both this and the next chapter, over the years 1955–1973, quietly but assuredly the Commission and Court were putting in place the foundations necessary for a European Bill of Rights." —Bates
 * "Because of the Commission and international pressure the Greek government did not carry out serious reprisals against witnesses..." —Becket
 * I checked several other sources and Risini 2018, Dickson 2010, Inglese 2007, Yourow 1996 etc. all capitalize.
 * Wikipedia is not a law-related reference, but a general reference, and has a style guide, which includes MOS:INSTITUTIONS. We get the information from reliable sources and then apply Wikipedia style to it. -- JHunterJ (talk) 14:20, 14 December 2020 (UTC)

@ But the MOS is not an absolute rule that must be applied strictly without any exception... the page itself states that “It is a generally accepted standard that editors should attempt to follow, though it is best treated with common sense, and occasional exceptions may apply.” Note the “should attempt to follow” instead of “must attempt..”, and also the possibility of “occasional exceptions”. In this case Commission and Convention should be capitalized because they refer to a specific institution or treaty, while if you don’t capitalize it, you refer to institutions or treaties in general. Danu Widjajanto (talk) 13:03, 15 December 2020 (UTC)
 * I agree, and it looks like we have a rough consensus to capitalize in this specific case. (t &#183; c)  buidhe  16:28, 15 December 2020 (UTC)
 * No, you don't. You have a WP:LOCALCONSENSUS, which is to be avoided. You need to convince the broader community that this is an improvement here (and it isn't). -- JHunterJ (talk) 13:15, 16 December 2020 (UTC)
 * Yep. There is definitely not "a rough consensus" to capitalize this, because it flies in the face of the very reason that MOS:CAPS exists and says everything that it does. This is most definitely a WP:CONLEVEL and WP:FALSECONSENSUS failure, and is the same kind of "me and my handful of wikiproject buddies have decided to override site-wide policies and guidelines" antics that have frequently resulted ArbCom findings of fact against this kin kind of "topical fiefdom" behavior. See in particular Arbitration/Index/Principles: a "local consensus" is only applicable in absence of a site-wide one on the same general matter, and there is no such absence here.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  03:56, 1 January 2021 (UTC)
 * What gives you that idea? 207.161.86.162 (talk) 07:09, 18 July 2021 (UTC)


 * Use lower-case. This is a classic WP:Specialized-style fallacy and WP:Common-style fallacy combo. WP is not written in legal/governmental style, which frequently over-capitalizes such terms, and MOS:CAPS already address this particular style of capitalizing words taken from a proper name then used generically (namely: don't do it here). If you are writing about Harvard, you do not write "in 1987, the University decided to" on Wikipedia.  Worse, these specific instances are clearly a MOS:SIGCAPS problem: the purpose is  emphasis.  These Greek government  CE cases are no exception, and no amount of trying to rely exclusively on on legal style / bureaucratese is going to make it into one.  We've been over this debate before many, many times with regard to US governmental agencies and job titles, British governmental and peerage titles, names of eponymous "laws", terms of religious or other institutional doctrine, the US and other constitutions, etc., etc., etc.  We have an entire guideline at MOS:CAPS about this for a reason, and it says over and over again not to capitalize such things, for a reason. This isn't an exception, but an illustration of the very reason these rules exist. Capitalizing these terms in this exact context does nothing useful for the reader, any more than doing it would in the context of any other council, court, or convention. People really need to stop trying their hardest to come up with reasons to depart from the style guide. "Some other writers I'm reading write differently" is not a rationale that ever works here.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  03:56, 1 January 2021 (UTC); rev'd. 05:23, 1 January 2021 (UTC)
 * It's not a "Greek government case", it's a Council of Europe case. The capitalization is not emphasis, it's just what is used by all reliable sources on this topic. (t &#183; c)  buidhe  04:07, 1 January 2021 (UTC)
 * "Greek": thought I already fixed that. Anyway, it is obviously emphasis, and we have an entire section at MOS:SIGCAPS on of emphasis (and not to use it). It simply is not the case that "all reliable sources" on this topic do it; most reliable sources written in a particular legalistic idiom do it (as do many journalists, especially European ones), but WP is not a publication that writes that way. I repeat: we have been over this many times before with regard to US, UK, and other subjects, and the answer is always the same.  It simply does not matter that, say, US legal writers lean heavily toward writing things like "The Court, in considering the Constitution and its applicability to ...".  WP doesn't do it.  Neither does AAAS's Science ("the council"), Deutsche Welle 's English edition  (despite a strong German prejudice to capitalize all nouns), The Guardian ("the council", "the convention", though I'm not sure they're self-consistent on the matter), Stockholm Center for Freedom ("the court"), Arab News English ed. ("the court"), International Commission of Jurists ("the court" as quoted in the previous source; this, despite a strong prejudice of lawyers-writing-for-lawyers to write "Court"), BBC (quoting press release of a Guernsey official, "the convention", "this convention"), The Times (https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/human-rights-are-a-vital-component-of-democracy-sd5gxh30b "the convention"), The Independent (https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/brexit-deal-crime-data-eu-b1779031.html "the convention"). Not all of these sources are internally consistent from article to article, nor between all of these terms, nor even always within the same article. E.g. some articles in Arab News use "the court" but also use both "the convention" and "the Convention" in the same piece; The Guardian is sometimes weird in not capitalizing the longer forms, either; the BBC piece had one sore-thumb instance of "the Convention" in it (quoting the same source that repeatedly used "the/this convention", and they did the same thing in their own editorial voice here). But it doesn't need to be consistently lower-case in a particular publication or across all of them; all that needs to be shown to trigger the first rule of MOS:CAPS is that a significant number of independent RS do not consistently capitalize. That is the fact with these terms (which anyone could predict, though finding these examples took only a few minutes), so we use lower-case. The same patterns hold for other such cases (UN conventions of various sorts, national supreme courts, and other councils, committees, unions, etc., etc.  It took roughly 10 × longer to paste up these examples than to find them, and they're all just from the first page of search results for each term's news search.  There is nothing special in any orthographic regard about the CE, EC, EU, UN, US, UK, the US state of Florida, the municipal government of Melbourne, etc.   — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  05:05, 1 January 2021 (UTC)
 * When I said "this topic", I meant this particular case, not the ECHR in general. Regardless, I think it makes the most sense to follow the established format in scholarly sources. MOS is meant to be a guideline, not a hard and fast rule to be strictly applied even when it doesn't benefit the encyclopedia. (t &#183; c)  buidhe  05:26, 1 January 2021 (UTC)
 * That's the WP:Specialized style fallacy, and you know by now that WP does not do that. We do not write video-game articles the way gamer mags and sites do. We do not write enterntainment-industry articles the way E! and Rolling Stone do.  We do not write bird articles in the impenetrable jargon of ornithology journals.  If we did these things we would have no style guide at all and no title policy, and there would be no consistency except within a narrow category, with each of those slavishly mimicking specialist publications in those topics.  Yet that is not the reality, is it?  I have to say that I'm concerned about the frequency with which you are doing non-admin RM closures, when you so frequently make RM arguments that are counter to policy and practice. (Plus, unresponsive when challenged even by multiple editors.)  You're next engaging in the false dichotomy fallacy (MoS not being as wishy-washy as you would like does not mean it is "a hard and fast rule to be strictly applied even when [etc.]"), with a touch of the fallacy of equivocation (you're using a general, hand-wavy sense of what "guideline" might mean, when WP has a particular definition; not only that, it  "Wikipedia generally does not employ hard-and-fast rules", and applies this even to policies, not just guidelines; so all your hand-wringing about this is just a distraction. If this guideline is applied in the same manner as the rest of them (and it is), then there is no problem in its application. You close with the begging the question fallacy: you're  that over-capitalizing these things will "benefit the encyclopedia" and using that as a premise for your argument, yet the entire reason this RM is open is that this is probably not true. The very fact that we have a guideline against this kind of excessive use of capital letters indicates a clear consensus that it is not a benefit.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  16:33, 3 April 2021 (UTC)
 * Wherever possible, do not capitalise. Tony (talk)  01:57, 16 May 2021 (UTC)
 * Support lower-case - Plenty of sources using lower-case. Primergrey (talk) 01:26, 8 June 2021 (UTC)
 * Support lowercase per MOS:CAPS and everything wrote. And this is not the venue to overturn a central consensus when there is nothing exceptional about this case. 207.161.86.162 (talk) 06:41, 18 July 2021 (UTC)