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"State" should be capitalized when referring to the government of the state or the official name of the state, but otherwise not. -Rrius 18:55, 15 April 2010 (UTC) My question was intended to get a better idea of whether there is a need for the addition. I agree that "state" should not be capitalized in "state of _____".
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.
Sometimes the title-and-subtitle style with a colon works: Neoclassicism: antiquity recreated in an 18th-century mode. It is usually unnecessary to state what kind of image is being shown. A map of the world showing NATO member countries can be captioned simply NATO members rather than Map of NATO members .
This includes partial titles; e.g., a newspaper might have an in-house convention for all-caps in the first part of a title and all-lowercase in a subtitle: something like "JOHNSON WINS RUNOFF ELECTION: incumbent leads by at least 18% as polls close" should be rendered on Wikipedia as "Johnson Wins Runoff Election: Incumbent Leads by at Least ...
The question comes down bluntly to whether MOS (which is Tony1's argument) says proper names in the title cannot be capitalized, or if RS, which capitalized things, is more important for the capitalization in a title.
Proper names should be capitalized and this should be included in the Manual of Style. I have to add that I'm sad that it has to be included -- in my native language's Wikipedia it doesn't have to be included in the MoS, as it had already been included in grammar books for seven-year-olds, but judging from the edit wars in some articles ...
The simplest de-capitalization rule is to capitalize if, and only if, the title is directly used as a title in front of a name, so "President Nixon" but everywhere else "president". Such a rule could actually be followed.
But for everyday stuff such as encyclopedia articles, CMOS is firm about writing Donald Trump, president of the United States, with lower-case job title. Same with Elizabeth II, queen of England and Wilhelm II, emperor of Germany. CMOS says the capitalization should be saved for the formulation [job title] [name]: President Trump.