Talk:Style/Language/French
Discussion about French capitalization standard
CapitalizationStandardFrench > CapitalizationStandardFrench Discussion
{i} Purpose: This page should hold all discussion about current issues with guidelines concerning French capitalization standard.
Please try to be constructive and only keep objective arguments here.
Related documents that should be read
- a discussion during summer 2006 titled Is french silly? :p (French capitalization rules)
- related pages on Wikipedia.fr: De l'usage des majuscules
Current issues
Current guidelines are not widely accepted, and in particular the exception 1.1 (or A.1 in the English translation).
In result CapitalizationStandardFrench is not fully applied and French data are not uniform: the capitalization may change from an artist (or a release) to another one.
Trends
The current trends are described below.
Option 1: Simplify current guidelines
Always use the sentence case and throw the exception. Note: this solution is already used in practice by some editors.
Rationale (= pros)
- The current guidelines are too complex and are difficult to understand.
Refusal (= cons)
- Rules are not so complex, this is the CapitalizationStandardFrench page that is really confusing and need some clean-up.
Option 2: Keep & extend current guidelines
Keep the current guidelines and add additional rules such as one for symmetry (in order to fix non aesthetic situation like Le Rouge et le noir or Le Cerf, le druide et le loup).
Rationale (= pros)
- The current guidelines match common practice with books and Wikipedia.
- Additional rules are needed to fix non aesthetic case.
Refusal (= cons)
Examples
This section should provide interesting examples and the result with both options.
| Option 1 | Option 2 | Description/comment |
| Le rouge et le noir | Le Rouge et le Noir |
