Wiktionary:Capitalization

From Wiktionary, the free dictionary
Jump to navigation Jump to search
link={{{imglink}}} This is a Wiktionary policy, guideline or common practices page. Specifically it is a policy think tank, working to develop a formal policy.
Policies – Entries: CFI - EL - NORM - NPOV - QUOTE - REDIR - DELETE. Languages: LT - AXX. Others: BLOCK - BOTS - VOTES.

Entries (or "articles") in Wiktionary are case sensitive, meaning that two entries that differ only in capitalization are different entries. For example:

  • Turner is the entry for the English surname.
  • turner is the entry for the English word.
  • Likewise Bible is different from bible (the Christian/Jewish scriptures versus any comprehensive or authoritative source)

Such entries should point to each other using the "also" template. For example, the Turner entry starts with the wiki markup:

{{also|turner}}

If you find an entry that you believe has the wrong capitalization, simply move it yourself, request that an administrator move the page (if your attempt to move it fails), or ask for opinions on whether it should be moved on the entry's talk page or in the Tea room.

For phrases and other multiple-word entries, the correct capitalization is that which would be used if the phrase appeared in the middle (or end) of a regular sentence (i.e., in "running text"):

  1. Correct: hit the bottle
  2. Correct: Pythagorean theorem

As compared to Wikipedia[edit]

Wiktionary's capitalization policy is different from that of Wikipedia and most other Wikimedia projects. For those other projects, the page name is a title and always has its first letter capitalized. But that capitalization is confusing and inappropriate for Wiktionary, so it has been disabled. (As a technical note, this is achieved by having Wiktionary run with the MediaWiki parameter $wgCapitalLinks parameter set to false.)

See also[edit]