The Elder Scrolls Wiki:Capitalization

This page is a TESWiki guideline It illustrates standards of conduct that are generally accepted by consensus to apply in many cases. Feel free to update the page as needed, but please use the discussion page to propose major changes.

See also: TES:EMPH

This page discusses the use of upper and lower case usage (capitalization) in general.

Summary

Capitalization should generally follow standard English rules, however there are a few points to keep in mind:

Capitalization should match that which is used in-game, even if it differs from standard capitalization.

In titles and subheadings, all words should be capitalized except prepositions and conjunctions. For example:

• "The Throat of the World" and "At the Summit of Apocrypha".

If a word is used on its own in infoboxes, lists or tables, it should be capitalized. If it is part of a sentence, it should follow normal capitalization rules.

• "Vilkas carries a steel sword."
• "Calcelmo carries a Dwarven dagger"

Proper nouns

Proper nouns should be capitalized as they appear in-game, for example:

• "Red Mountain is a volcano located in Vvardenfell."

Proper nouns such as "The Reach" if used in a sentence should not capitalize "the" unless it's at the start of the sentence. For example:

• "Markarth is located in the Reach."
• "The Reach is located in Skyrim."

Titles should such as "High King" or "Jarl" should be used as follows:

• "Many people believe Ulfric murdered High King Torygg."
• "Ulfric sought to become high king."

Article and category titles

Because of the design of MediaWiki, the software used to run The Elder Scrolls Wiki:About, capitalization is a bigger issue than you might think it deserves. An article called Some Test Article is different than the article Some test article. However, Some test article and some test article are exactly the same thing; capitalization of the first word in a link doesn't matter. Using a consistent case for article titles is therefore pretty important.

When referencing an article, do so as if it weren't an article. If we're talking about style and formatting, we reference the article just like that. However, if the article name were to come at the beginning of the sentence, as in "Style and formatting is important for the TESWiki," we'd capitalize the first letter. As noted before, both of these articles point to exactly the same place.

Subheading titles

Subheading titles should, in general, have only the first letter capitalized. Any other capitalization should occur only according to standard English rules.

Capitalization of in-game terms

Just because a term is in the game does not mean it should be capitalized. This means, we should not see sentences like this:

The Guildleader of the Thieves Guild walks around the Southwest portion of the City at Night while wielding a Torch.

This is extremely annoying to read. This sentence should read:

The guildleader of the Thieves Guild walks around the southwest portion of the city at night while wielding a torch.

Any exceptions to this rule are noted in the section above.