Talk:Minimum information required in the annotation of models

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Requested move[edit]

The following discussion is an archived discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the move request was: page moved. I should note that this reverses an undiscussed move to the capitalized title. Vegaswikian (talk) 19:59, 10 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]



Minimum Information Required in the Annotation of ModelsMinimum information required in the annotation of models

Nature Biotechnology: Minimum information requested in the annotation of biochemical models (MIRIAM)"

Well, I rest my case.

Per WP:MOSCAPS ("Wikipedia avoids unnecessary capitalization") and WP:TITLE, this is a generic, common term, not a propriety or commercial term, so the article title should be downcased. In addition, WP:MOSCAPS says that a compound item should not be upper-cased just because it is abbreviated with caps. Lowercase will match the formatting of related article titles. Tony (talk) 10:47, 3 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

No, I believe you are wrong. All the Minimal Requirements are capitalised. Cf. http://mibbi.org/. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_Information_Standards

See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIAME http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIAPE http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIASE

Nature Biotechnology forced us to use lowercases in the title. But it should be capitalised. Nicolas Le Novere (talk) 11:29, 4 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Right, so an academic journal as prestigious as Nature Bio is allowed to use its own (very intelligent) house style, but Wikipedia must bow before the capitalisers? Tony (talk) 14:52, 4 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
It is not a question of prestigious versus non-prestigious (first of all the prestige of Nat Biotechnol has nothing to do with its typesetting. Those rules are decided by the publisher's staff and are often applied to all journals, prestigious and not prestigious. Some very prestigious journals for instance force people to use "Parkinson disease" instead of "Parkinson's disease" despite the fact that the latter is the official denomination in the International Classification of Diseases. Some also use Liter and Meter instead of Litre and Metre, despite the later being the official units, completely unrelated to the British vs American spelling). It is a question of what is the official name. And the official name is capitalised. It is because I invented it. Nicolas Le Novere (talk) 18:46, 5 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support. The proposer's reasoning is correct, and the evidence from the prestigious journal only confirms that lower case is apt. This preference is by no means an innovation on Wikipedia. I did a Googlebooks search on "Minimum Information * in the Annotation of Models" -LLC. There were 35 genuine hits. On a search of the results page:

25 used lower case
10 used upper case

Results from further inspection of items using upper case:

7 only used the phrase in presenting the acronym MIRIAM, or in title case in references
2 elsewhere also used lower case
1 could not be inspected

Clearly the published literature does not show that capitalisation is necessary for this phrase, since the great majority of sources use lower case. (It is against the advice of most style guides to capitalise when introducing an acronym, but it is commonly done; such a practice cannot be taken as affecting normal use in continuous text.)
If, on the other hand, the article is about some proprietary item or some explicit standard, it should be rewritten to reflect that. There are other issues with the article. It needs a good copyedit (misplaced reference numbers, and so on). What is the story on the use of that logo at the start? I thought these were only to be shown in infoboxes.
NoeticaTea? 00:34, 5 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
It is not a "phrase", it is a name. You cannot split the different words, and say for instance "minimal information required in the annotation of electrical models" or "minimal information absolutely required in the annotation of electrical models". The string of characters is "MinimalspaceInformationspaceRequiredspaceinspacethespaceAnnotationspaceofspaceModels". Like Noetica. It is not noetica, or nOETICA. And it is of course about an explicit standard. You can find it on BioModels.net webpage (the parent project), on the MIBBI portal (the repository of minimal checklists), and on the BioSharing.org website. In all three cases, capitalised.
Regarding the copyedit, by all mean, go on. Thank-you very much for your help. Nicolas Le Novere (talk) 10:22, 7 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Why was it good enough for Nature, then? Tony (talk) 00:02, 6 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
It is a phrase; it is a noun phrase, to be exact. That does not preclude its being a name also (like "Great Britain" or "[The] Lake Isle of Innisfree"); but whatever else it is, it a phrase that describes something. In the literature, it is by no means usually capitalised; and therefore it is not to be capitalised on Wikipedia: "Wikipedia avoids unnecessary capitalization". I have demonstrated that with hard, articulated evidence (see above). That's how we proceed here.
NoeticaTea? 00:29, 6 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
In the literature it should. And if you go to
The above discussion is preserved as an archive of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.