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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.
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.
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.
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 ...
Any one article should use a consistent approach throughout. Most captions are not complete sentences, but merely sentence fragments , which should not end with a period or full stop . If any complete sentence occurs in a caption, then all sentences, and any sentence fragments , in that caption should end with a period or full stop.
Capitalize other titles only when they precede the name, else they are lower case. Examples: den leader; district executive; council commissioner; adviser (when referring to an Order of the Arrow adviser) When a title includes words that are capitalized per the first rule, only those words are capitalized unless it precedes the name. Examples:
month–month: the 1940 peak period was May–July; the peak period was May–July 1940; (but the peak period was May 1940 – July 1940 uses a spaced en dash; see below) In certain cases where at least one item on either side of the en dash contains a space, then a spaced en dash ( {{ snd }} ) is used.
Most capitalization is for proper names or for acronyms. Wikipedia relies on sources to determine what is a proper name; words and phrases that are consistently capitalized in sources are treated as proper names and capitalized in Wikipedia." The meaning of the first sentence has been present since this edit in December 2007.