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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.
Wikipedia:Wikipedia is a tertiary source – describes how Wikipedia is an encyclopedia and as such Wikipedia is a tertiary source. References ^ Bould, Dylan M., et al., References that anyone can edit: review of Wikipedia citations in peer reviewed health science literature , 2014, British Medical Journal , 6 March 2014, 348 DOI , online from BMJ
Wikipedia article titles and section headings use sentence case, not title case; see Wikipedia:Article titles and § Section headings. For capitalization of list items, see § Bulleted and numbered lists. Other points concerning capitalization are summarized below. Full information can be found at Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Capital letters.
An indefinite or definite article is capitalized only when at the start of a title, subtitle, or embedded title or subtitle. For example, a book chapter titled "An Examination of The Americans: The Anachronisms in FX's Period Spy Drama" contains three capitalized leading articles (main title "An", embedded title "The", and subtitle "The").
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.
However, this should only be done in articles about viruses or virology; mentions of virus taxa in articles about other forms of life should follow the normal rules for italicizing scientific names. Italicize all lower ranks (taxa): genus (capitalized), subgenus (capitalized), species, subspecies.
An infobox image and, in the absence of an infobox, a photograph or other image in the article's lead section, serves to illustrate the topic of the article, as such, the caption should work singularly towards that purpose. Depending on the nature of the subject and the image used, the ideal caption can range from none at all to a regular full ...
Wikipedia has style guidelines (start at WP:Manual of Style/Capital letters) for determining matters of capitalization in writing the encyclopedia, and these guidelines appeal to the notions of proper name and proper noun in a way informed by sound linguistic theory.