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In English and most other languages with upper- and lower-case letterforms, the main elements in proper names are usually capitalized, though there is not quite a one-to-one relationship between fixed use of capital letters (as opposed to incidental capitalization, such as at the start of a sentence) and a text string being a proper name.
Wikipedia avoids unnecessary capitalization.In English, capitalization is primarily needed for proper names, acronyms, and for the first letter of a sentence. [a] Wikipedia relies on sources to determine what is conventionally capitalized; only words and phrases that are consistently capitalized in a substantial majority of independent, reliable sources are capitalized in Wikipedia.
Names of planets, moons, asteroids, comets, stars, constellations, and galaxies are proper names, and therefore capitalized (The planet Mars is in the constellation Gemini, near the star Pollux). The first letter of every word in such a name is capitalized ( Alpha Centauri and not Alpha centauri ; Milky Way , not Milky way ).
The name of an individual work within the series name: the Star Wars franchise, named for the Star Wars film; the Three Colours trilogy, named for films with the prefix Three Colours. Do not capitalize or italicize descriptive terms that are not part of an official series title (as with "franchise" and "trilogy" in those two examples).
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.
APA Style is a “down” style, meaning that words are lowercase unless there is specific guidance to capitalize them such as words beginning a sentence; proper nouns and trade names; job titles and positions; diseases, disorders, therapies, theories, and related terms; titles of works and headings within works; titles of tests and measures; nouns followed by numerals or letters; names of ...
Following an official name change, Wikipedia does not automatically switch to the new one, but follows the most common usage in independent reliable sources written after the change. Previous names are often better placed in the article body (e.g. under a "History" section) than in the lead, especially if there are several of them.
For example, instead of adding a new section about capital letters, and mentioning scientific names both there and in the section about italics, we should have a section about scientific names where we say that they should be in italics, with the generic name capitalized. Peter Chastain 20:40, 18 May 2010 (UTC)