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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.
Generally acronyms and initialisms are capitalized, e.g., "NASA" or "SOS". Sometimes, a minor word such as a preposition is not capitalized within the acronym, such as "WoW" for "World of Warcraft". In some British English style guides, only the initial letter of an acronym is capitalized if the acronym is read as a word, e.g., "Nasa" or ...
See the discussion of official common names under common name for an explanation. Common nouns may be capitalized when used as names for the entire class of such things, e.g. what a piece of work is Man. Other Romance languages such as French often capitalize such nouns as l'État (the state) and l'Église (the church) when not referring to ...
English vernacular ("common") names are given in lower case in article prose (plains zebra, mountain maple, and southwestern red-tailed hawk) and in sentence case at the start of sentences and in other places where the first letter of the first word is capitalized.
Like common nouns that are derived or associated with proper names (a few are mentioned above), adjectives, verbs, and adverbs derived from proper names are not themselves proper names, but they are normally still capitalized in English (though not in many other languages): Dickensian and Balkan (adjectives), Balkanize (verb), Trumpishly ...
The president has been criticized for his unconventional way of capitalizing words that aren't proper nouns, including "border," "military," and "country."
This is quite an isolated case. If a name is composed of a common noun and a proper noun, and the name has not been established as an actual name (i.e.: it really is isolated to the context), would the common noun part of the name be capitalized, or would rules for capitalization still apply, forbidding capitals on the common noun?
Common nouns are defined as those that are neither proper nouns nor pronouns. [9] They are the most numerous and the most frequently used in English. Common nouns can be further divided into count and non-count nouns. A count noun can take a number as its determiner (e.g., -20 degrees, zero calories, one cat, two bananas, 276 dollars).