Wikipedia:WikiProject Music/MUSTARD/Capitalization
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
[edit] Capitalization
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- The vast majority of music genres are not proper nouns, and thus should not be capitalized.
- The first letter in the first and last words in song, album and other titles is capitalized. The first letter in the other words is also capitalized, except for coordinating conjunctions, prepositions, and articles, that are less than five letters long, as well as the word to in infinitives. More specifically:
- Capitalize the first and last word.
- Capitalize every noun, verb and adverb. This includes all forms of the verb to be (e.g., be, been, am, is, was, were).
- Capitalize only those prepositions that are the first or last word of the title, or are part of a two-word phrasal verb (e.g., "Walk On" or "Give Up the Ghost").
- With compound hyphenated terms, capitalize each word-part separately, according to the applicable rule.
- Titles that include parentheses should be capitalized as though both the part inside and outside the parentheses are separate titles (e.g., "(Don't Fear) The Reaper")
- If possible, check with an authoritative source to determine whether the word the is part of a band's name. For example, the Beatles is not correct, according to Wikipedia:WikiProject The Beatles/Policy, but the Pixies is. In either case, the opposite should always redirect (or be disambiguated) to avoid multiple articles.
- If the, a or an is the first word in a band's name, it should always be capitalized, as in "It is my opinion that The Beatles rock, as does the Dave Matthews Band."
- Standard English text formatting and capitalization rules apply to the names of bands and individual artists (see Wikipedia:Manual of Style (trademarks)).
