Wikipedia talk:Proper names and proper nouns

Early drafting
The nutshell and lede being verbose, and ranty. Below there may be better nutshell material. Eg “ The short answer to all such questions is: because it is not conventional to capitalize all these things in encyclopedic writing. I.e., they are not broadly treated as proper names, in the linguistic sense.”

I take from that, as the writers assertion: “Wikipedia capitalises names if they are broadly treated as proper names in the linguistic sense”. Yes?

The lede would do well to more gently introduce the linguistic and philosophical senses as if to a person new to these terms. (Who is the intended audience of this?).

—SmokeyJoe (talk) 00:02, 29 December 2020 (UTC)

I trimmed the intro material a lot. Integrated your sentence into the nutshell in place of much of it, but kept the gist of why the philosophy sense doesn't work. The purpose of the lead paragraph is essentially the same as at an article, to compress the page into a short abstract; the material you marked up with is all covered in the very next section, and I think people understand that the page is going to work that way.

But it's a waste of editorial time to try to source a page like this as if it's an article. It's just a brain-dump essay. If someone reads the linked articles and their source material, and is convinced this article is wrong, they can write their own essay. I'm not advancing this as a Supplement page that has been vetted by the community, its just a place to consolidate arguments that have come up many times and which play out the same way, and why.

Regarding your inlined comment, These pseudo quotes misrepresent the writers meaning. It is not about “deserve”, or giving value. It is about consistency and recognition, and is a problem especially for names not readily parsed as names, such as snakes and ladders and go., and its context:
 * I made these into pseudo-quotes because I was shoehorning years of similar arguments into a single point each. Since that didn't work well, I've broken it out further.
 * But "iconic and ancient" is at least in part about deserve/value; it's inherently a value judgement, a weighing of subjective importance. So, I kept that, but not about games, since I think you felt your specific point on that wasn't represented properly. I made the trademark versus "iconic" thing be about other than games; we more often encounter such arguments from MOS:DOCTCAPS quarters, anyway.
 * The "consistency" point cuts both ways. In the way you mean it, it's already covered by the king example above the game stuff. But as for games, the argument to capitalize "Snakes and Ladders" is against consistency, against the names of other folk/traditional games, sports, dances, song and poetry types, genres, etc., etc., etc. (Though there are isolated exceptions people have argued for at exhaustive length, e.g. capitalizing "Classical music" and major visual-arts movements like "Art Nouveau". Not everyone agrees with this, of course.)
 * Even including the snakes and ladders example, from a "recognition" angle (which I take to mean "recognizability", not "give it the recognition it deserves", per the above), is a poor fit, because that's not really a proper-name issue/question of the sort in that bullet list. It's really a MOS:SIGCAPS case, of using capitalization as a form of disambiguating or "term of art"-indicating emphasis. It's not an uncommon tactic in some forms of writing, but it doesn't work at WP (see below).
 * Go (the game) can take italics as transliterated Japanese, thus obviating a "need" to capitalize. And I'm not sure anyone has an appetite to try to go lower-case it anyway; we might conclude that it's a weird, conventionalized exception like "The Hague" taking a capital T. It would be interesting to see if it is as universally capitalized, outside of go-specific sources (e.g. in dictionaries and in games encyclopedias) as I've seen claimed.

On SIGCAPS: Everyone wants to capitalize the significant/special/unique stuff in their field if anyone else gets to in theirs (or sometimes even if they don't!). This is why the whole "bird caps" thing exploded into 8 years of drama. But the caps aren't necessary, as demonstrated by decapitalization of vernacular names of bird species (along with many other topics). All one has to do is write more clearly, and that's what we should be doing anyway (if for no other reason than that screen readers don't tell if you whether something's capitalized; it's like trying to rely on color to convey meaning). E.g., don't write "As a child, Jones was fond of snakes and ladders", but "As a child, Jones was fond of the game snakes and ladders." The clearer wording and the link are sufficient disambiguation. Same with animal breeds: "Jones has two Persian cats", not "Jones has two Persians". LOL. It's possibly even reasonable to hyphenate the game name; I know I've seen it that way, but I don't know how many sources use snakes-and-ladders versus snakes and ladders. If it were all that common, though, I think the hyphenated form would have been mentioned in the RM. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  22:17, 4 January 2021 (UTC)


 * SMcCandlish, Thanks.
 * "It's just a brain-dump essay". No, it's not just. It is a very good start at resolving something that has a lot of well meaning Wikipedians confused.
 * --SmokeyJoe (talk) 22:47, 4 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Glad you think so! But you should have seen the writing process. >;-)  It involved one F-load of coffee.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  23:10, 4 January 2021 (UTC)

Definition of proper noun unclear
I have read through this essay and I still don't understand what a 'proper noun' is in the linguistic sense. The essay variously states:


 * It is used to identify and refer to one or more particular things, which may be unique, or a group, or a special class of thing, but usually not a generalized class of things
 * they are mostly conventionally capitalized, though there is not quite a one-to-one relationship between use of capital letters and a text string being a proper name
 * What qualifies as a proper name in the linguistic sense is subjective
 * the linguistic sense varies sharply from language to language, and in many of them (English more so than average) is intimately bound up with orthography
 * Various proper names do not receive capitals

But none of these amount to a procedure for determining whether a given string is a proper noun or not. Even worse, the article Proper noun itself says A proper noun is a noun that identifies a single entity and is used to refer to that entity; I don't see how to reconcile that with the essay's definition of the supposedly distinct concept of a proper name in philosophy as a text string or utterance that uniquely identifies a specific referent in a particular context.

The main point is just that Wikipedia capitalizes based on capitalization in reliable sources rather than philosophical uniqueness of reference, right? Does the concept of 'proper noun' even need to be introduced to communicate this point? Rublov (talk) 19:56, 26 January 2022 (UTC)
 * I'm sorry you have trouble with it. Various people do, and there's an entire quasi-discipline within both linguistics and philosophy devoted to arguing about it and they've been arguing about it for centuries, so some people not having a clear idea what a proper name is (in which sense) isn't surprising. (A hint about the ling./phil. distinction: "a specific referent in a particular context" has nothing to do with the linguistics meaning; many, many more things are "proper names" in the phil. sense, but this has no implications for orthography at all.)  Yes, it needs to be addressed here because people will bring up "proper name" and "proper noun", again and again and again, often without a clear idea what they even mean (and most often with an incorrect assumption that everything they think is a proper name, in one sense or another "must" be capitalized). Yes, the WP rule is we do not apply capitals to a name/term unless reliable sources do so with near uniformity, but we do so if they do (and that explains why there are some orthographically odd-ball things that some people don't like, e.g. "The Hague" taking a capitalized "The").  Anyway, if you don't find this essay helpful to you, just ignore it.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  05:44, 27 January 2022 (UTC)

An essay in serious need of repair and improvement
Well, I've made a start. The article Proper noun is a sound and well-reviewed point of reference for this work, though it too needs a few fixes. Let's hope others will step in and continue the Augean work of reform, because this essay is being used as something knowledgeable and authoritative at various talkpages. It decidedly is not knowledgeable and authoritative. I'm uncomfortable doing much more of this myself, as a mere anon these days. Ciao! 49.190.56.203 (talk) 03:02, 29 January 2024 (UTC)