Template talk:SI unit lowercase

A suggestion for major rephrase
How's this? A "usually lowercase common noun" is valid for English and other languages such as French, but the "common noun" retains its validity in German where common nouns are also capitalized. The "degree Celsius" exception is moved slightly out of the way. Most importantly, the correct form is seen clearly on the left. A person picture could be more appropriate than the SI picture. --Geoffrey 03:54, 29 March 2006 (UTC)
 * It has all the bad things I mentioned above--plus the additional spacing problems in the person's name in that second cell. Gene Nygaard 04:37, 29 March 2006 (UTC)
 * Years ago (well, almost ;)) I have provided six variants (sic) of this template and no one seems to have noticed them. In the end I don't know what to do about the problem. For articles that I edit myself I'll try following the right convention. As to other articles, it seems that there's not much willing to solve the issue. --Gennaro Prota 12:07, 29 March 2006 (UTC)

Hideous
This box is absolutely hideous and intrusive. A bright yellow border is not in any way attractive and it's very distracting to catch a glimpse of. This sort of formatting is not used anywhere else on wikipedia and with good reason. Night Gyr (talk/Oy) 02:24, 30 June 2006 (UTC)

Wrong about degree Celsius
The template is wrong. It states that the SI unit "degree Celsius" is an exception to the lowercase rule. This unit is not an exception, since it begins with a lowercase letter: "d". The fact that it has a capital C in the middle is a weird anomaly that is not relevant to any other unit, so does not need to be mentioned in this template. --Heron 18:17, 3 July 2006 (UTC)

Yes, it is wrong
Right now, the template says this:

"This SI unit is named after . As with all SI units whose names are derived from the proper name of a person, the first letter of its symbol is uppercase ('). But when an SI unit is spelled out, it should always be written in lowercase ('), unless it begins a sentence or is the name "degree Celsius"."

1) This text is clearly wrong about degree Celsius. Degree Celsius is not an exception; it is actually in keeping with the rule. The SI brochure clearly states: "In keeping with this rule, the correct spelling of the name of the unit with the symbol °C is "degree Celsius" (the unit degree begins with a lower-case d and the modifier Celsius begins with an upper-case C because it is a proper name)".

2) The text also ignores the fact that an SI unit may be written with an uppercase starting letter "in capitalized material such as a title".

I will change the text to something correct, and then it can be discussed if the wording should be different. Wikipedia should not state something clearly wrong while this is been discussed.

I will change it into this:

"This SI unit is named after . As with all SI units whose names are derived from the proper name of a person, the first letter of its symbol is uppercase ('). But, in English, when an SI unit is spelled out, it should always start with a lowercase letter ('), except at the beginning of a sentence or in capitalized material such as a title. Note that e.g. "degree Celsius" is in keeping with this rule."

The reader can then follow the link to the brochure if she wants to read the details.

--Jhertel (talk) 06:55, 12 January 2008 (UTC)


 * I don't really care about what anybody says about this 'lower case' spelling of any unit. As far as I'm concerned, if a unit is capitalised, like 'C' or 'F', then I prefer to spell as Coulomb, Farad etc, with capital C for Coulomb, and capital F for Farad. That is for consistency. 1 C for 1 Coulomb. 1 F for 1 Farad. As for whoever made up the "lower case" convention, I don't agree with it. Although, I do understand that the lower-case format is to make documents look better - without needing to have attention-drawing capital letters in among usual text. But the choice of 'case' for the leading character should be optional in my opinion. KorgBoy (talk) 11:42, 20 July 2017 (UTC)

Compromise?
How about an infobox or something listing the name (in lowercase), the abbreviation (in uppercase), whatever other fun infoboxy stuff we like, and a link to the SI rules? --Geoffrey 01:19, 28 July 2006 (UTC)
 * It's certainly more attractive than the horrible yellow thing, and the subtle link to the SI rules doesn't get in the way. Without the globe it would be even less obtrusive. Perhaps a small icon meaning 'unit' would work, although I'm not sure what such an icon would look like. This is the nearest I can find to a logo for the SI, but then it's presumably copyright. Perhaps we can make one up. How about this, as a crude example: [[image:SI-logo-fictional.jpg|thumb|64px|left|A logo I just invented]] ? --Heron 19:54, 28 July 2006 (UTC)


 * The idea of the template was to tell people that "watt" or "kelvin" are normal words, and should not be capitalised as names of people are. The larger template is nice though, and maybe it should be applied to all SI units: a new template should be made for that ("SI unit lowercase" is not very descriptive, just Template:SI unit would do).
 * Maybe we could simplify this template to something very essential, such as:
 * This SI unit is derived from the name of a person. The name of the unit, however, is capitalised as a normal word, not as a person's.
 * Less is more...
 * Yes, I agree to simplification. I withdraw my suggestion of a logo, since no image at all would be even better. BTW, the second sentence is incomplete. How about the version below?
 * This SI unit is named after a person. The name of the unit, however, is capitalised as a common noun, not a proper noun.
 * --Heron 20:45, 4 August 2006 (UTC)
 * I don't really see the need for this clarification at all, as a template. This seems to me to be normal encyclopedic content, and should just go in the body of the article. The template using the example jimbowale is bad, because that's a case where you would capitalize it, under common wikipedia standards for common nouns. You wouldn't put, say, erg in lowercase in a template like that. A joule is not an exception, it's the fact that it isn't an exception which is causing this problem. If there must be a template, the more minimal the better. Arturus 05:23, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

Changes for grammar and clarity
I have made some small changes to the wording so that it reads better. I marked the edit as major because its effect is magnified by being on a number of articles. Feel free to tweak it further if you feel it is necessary.

The reasons for the changes are as follows: it is improper to begin a sentence with "But" and the last part was not clear (because of the upper case "C" - it was the reason I came here after checking the SI brochure link). I changed "is in keeping with" to "comforms to" partly because it is more encyclopedic, but also to ensure that the template doesn't wrap to another line. Secret Squïrrel, approx 02:55, 27 January 2007 (Earth Standard Time)