User:Dicklyon/RM

New York City Subway → New York City subway – Case correction per WP:NCCAPS and MOS:CAPS in light of majority lowercase use in sources. Dicklyon (talk) 06:28, 11 October 2021 (UTC)

Background and extended rationale
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It has been 10 years (see Talk:New York City Subway/Archive 3) since we last looked at the capitalization of "Subway" here, and found no consensus to change it, even though editors who looked at the evidence agreed that sources use lowercase for this. The Opposers mostly cited signs, maps, equipment, and logos, which it was pointed out are conventionally title case, so not relevant to the criteria in our capitalization policy, or claimed that New York City Subway is a proper name, ignoring the evidence in sources. Some even claimed they want to follow the MTA itself, who operate the system, but didn't recognize that the MTA itself uses lowercase in sentence context.

Look at File:23 St 8 Av SB entrance.JPG used on 23rd Street station (IND Eighth Avenue Line). The station entrance sign in the photo uses capitalized Station (because signs typically use title case) while the Wikipedia article title uses sentence case (per policy WP:NCCAPS.  It's the same with Subway: map titles, signs, logos on trains, etc. use title case and cap it.  But WP policy says use sentence case, as informed by use in sentences in sources, which overwhelmingly (including by the MTA itself) use lowercase subway.  See book n-gram stats:
 * New York City Subway *,New York City subway *,New York Subway *,New York subway *
 * and * New York City Subway,* New York City subway

Of course, some signs with complete sentences use sentence case, as in File:New York subway sign assaulting.jpg, with "Assaulting MTA New York City Transit subway personnel is a felony punishable by up to 7 years in prison.", in which "New York City Transit" is an actual proper name of an organization, while subway is not. There was also a lot of grousing about how much work would need to be done to fix this. It would mean hundreds of moves and thousands of edits, and has probably only gotten worse over time. But that's really not a big problem, as we've seen in other case corrections that touched thousands of articles; it just takes some time and care with some tools like AWB. Before that last RM discussion in 2011, we had a brief discussion of the issue at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject New York City Public Transportation/Archive 14, where my detailed rationale with evidence got no pushback. It's still relevant, worth a look.

If you want to comment, please first be familiar with what our title policy is. The lead sentence at WP:NCCAPS says: Do not capitalize the second or subsequent words in an article title, unless the title is a proper name. For multiword page titles, one should leave the second and subsequent words in lowercase unless the title phrase is a proper name that would always occur capitalized, even mid-sentence. And also comment on the evidence, which as far as I can see is overwhelming showing that Subway does not occur capitalized in mid-sentence. Comments about caps on maps, signs, logos, and equipment, or other title-case contexts, are really not very relevant here.

Dicklyon (talk) 06:34, 11 October 2021 (UTC)