The comment reads:
possible duplicate of [link]
The missing capitalization bothers me a lot; it should be Possible.
asked Mar 30, 2010 at 10:27
7 Answers
down with capitalism!
answered Mar 30, 2010 at 10:34
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20I have, quite possibly, more fun on meta than I ought to have. Commented Mar 30, 2010 at 10:38
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This is "funny" and all, but it's not an answer. Yes, I know this is very old, but it still reflects poorly on the quality of MSE. Not to mention the blatant offensiveness about calling people with a certain political ideology "pigs". Commented Feb 14, 2021 at 7:01
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@TheforestofReinstateMonica If it ain't woke, fix it 'till it is. I realize this 11 year old joke could be considered offensive, though paired with the opposing post I made (which has fewer votes) it should be clear that it's a pair of answers with no content to allow meta users to vote on one option or the other, since that's what this question is about. Nevertheless, I'll remove the word "pigs" since it's a very loaded term, and by so doing it attacks the idea, not people who believe it. I hope this is woke enough for Meta to leave it, however I welcome delete votes by anyone who hates fun. Commented Feb 15, 2021 at 15:23
Obviously this is status-declined, so everyone should just accept the judgment passed down from on high, but to further elaborate a bit of why people might be bothered...
Bad punctuation/grammar/spelling is one thing when someone else does it, it's entirely another when it's attributed to you.
if jeff wants to rite liek this on his site thats his perogative.
If words are going to be automatically attributed to me, I don't want them to reflect badly on me.
If capitalizing a single letter is too hard, having the Community user be the comment owner would make this far less obnoxious.
answered Feb 24, 2012 at 1:20
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6Obviously, the system doesn't care about proper grammar. Oh wait: meta.stackexchange.com/questions/94370/… Commented Feb 24, 2012 at 2:03
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2@crush Exactly! I produce my own errors. I don't need any extras! Commented Jan 31, 2014 at 20:59
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1I agree. I just voted to close a question as a duplicate (first time I've done that), and the lowercase "p" reflects poorly on me. It should be a capital "P". Why is this even an issue? Just fix the stupid thing so it doesn't make people look bad who are trying to help. Commented Sep 10, 2015 at 5:34
Seriously, you don't even need to do anything other than add one CSS rule:
span.comment-copy:first-letter {
text-transform: uppercase;
}
How is that such a big deal, from the Stack Exchange network that features, among others, 'English Language and Usage' and 'Writers' and was (at least partially) meant to 'trick [us] into becoming...better writers if that's what it takes1 (emphasis Jeff's)?
If you're going to attribute words to us, or put our names on auto-generated comments, then follow the technical specifications of the language in which you're writing, I don't care whether, or not, this comment meets the syntactic and grammatical requirements of a sentence, it really is close enough that capitalisation should be the default.
And, frankly, not-capitalising means I have to waste my time editing a wrongly-capitalised auto-generated comment; if I'm doing that I'd rather not have the auto-comment, since it saves me precisely no time and increases general irritation.
...this has, clearly, been bugging me for a while. Please reconsider the status-declined; I really don't see any significant cost attached to making this request, instead, status-completed.
- Though the prior assertion about having us 'write without writing' is, in this case, rather more literal than I suspect was ever intended.
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3Though I'd also prefer the upper case P, using CSS to achieve that doesn't feel right to me either.– ArjanCommented Jun 11, 2012 at 17:30
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1Agreed; but if the problem was the amount of work/team-involvement required to implement an upper-cased first-letter this seemed to be the absolute easiest means I could think of (though, honestly, I have no idea how changing
possibletoPossiblecould involve less work than a simple database query or template-edit...). Commented Jun 11, 2012 at 17:39 -
1I'm sure changing it would have been less time spent than answering/declining this (and duplicate) questions. So I assume implementation effort is not the issue here...– ArjanCommented Jun 11, 2012 at 17:45
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3I hadn't considered it that way, to be honest; but if not implementation-effort it suggests a far less...rational/considered resistance to the request. Which seems a little, and I hate to use the word since I'm no longer an infant, unfair. (Not to mention slightly silly.) Commented Jun 11, 2012 at 17:47
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Maybe someone should run a query on the data dump to see whether uppercase or lowercase is more common for the first character of a comment. My suspicion is that lowercase is more common.
Update: As balpha indicated in a comment, upper-case is far more common:
From the SO March data dump (with the crippled comments, but statistically it should be okay): 1,934,139 comments total, 1,425,013 (73.68%) start with an uppercase letter, 247,919 (12.82%) with a lowercase letter, and 261,207 (13.51%) don't start with a letter at all.
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10From the SO March data dump (with the crippled comments, but statistically it should be okay): 1,934,139 comments total, 1,425,013 (73.68%) start with an uppercase letter, 247,919 (12.82%) with a lowercase letter, and 261,207 (13.51%) don't start with a letter at all. Commented Mar 30, 2010 at 14:13
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7In That Case, We All Need To Help Offset This Growing Problem By Capitalizing Every Word Of Our Comments.– AarobotCommented Mar 30, 2010 at 14:43
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8UsErs shOULd jUst cOntInUE UsIng thE sAmE cAsE As thEy hAvE ALwAys bEEn sIncE thEy ArE OnLy cOmmEnts– randomCommented Mar 30, 2010 at 15:15
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20CamelCaseIsTheWayToGoBecauseAllThoseSpaceCharactersTakeAwayValuableSpaceFromThe600CharLimit Commented Mar 30, 2010 at 15:24
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5@balpha - you might need to skip past the username if the comment starts with an @... Commented Mar 30, 2010 at 19:57
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1@balpha: And most of the ones which don't start with a letter probably start with "+1" or "-1". Don't know if it's worth it at this point.– mmyersCommented Mar 31, 2010 at 5:18
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3@Pollyanna, @mmyers: Even if all 13.51% no-letter-on-start comments could be argued to fall into the lowercase category, that would still leave us with a 74/26 split und thus the point remains: "Uppercase is more common." That's why I don't think it's worth to start special-casing. Commented Mar 31, 2010 at 5:25
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10@balpha - I actually agree with the OP - the capitalization should be corrected, regardless of the precedence. I expect that once you get past the usernames and other non alphabetic characters the incidence of uppercase will likely be higher than 74%. Note also that the OP is voted higher than my funny "against" post. I doubt there are many that actually want it to be lowercase. (but then I'm constantly surprised by people here, so....) Commented Mar 31, 2010 at 11:07
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@balpha Those that don't start with a letter at all start with what?! Commented Sep 25 at 22:50
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@balpha It's interesting to see that those sentences are even more than sentences that start with a lowercase letter! Commented Sep 26 at 13:02
This Is A Capital Idea!
answered Mar 30, 2010 at 14:34
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12Anyone opposing should be subject to capital punishment. Defining "capital punishment" in this context is left as an exercise to the reader.– mmyersCommented Mar 30, 2010 at 14:50
I posted this as suggestion / feature request on Meta.SO, yesterday.
This will be fixed as of build 3735 (on MSE/MSO) and build 2858 (on other sites).
(source)
So, as of those revisions, the feature request is status-completed!
It's not a complete sentence, so it doesn't need to be capitalized. We don't capitalize the tabs on the user page, or the homepage, for example.. or, heck, even here on the question page itself.
answered Apr 20, 2010 at 6:22
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25wHY WOULD IT BE SUCH A BIG PROBLEM TO CAPITALIZE THE THING? iT'S NOT THAT HARD AND IT WOULD LOOK BETTER.– alexCommented Apr 20, 2010 at 8:21
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26That case, add the words "This is a" and hey presto, a real sentence. Commented Apr 20, 2010 at 8:36
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17A sentence ("a string of words", so the one word tabs don't apply) must always be capitalized, "complete" or not (why is it not complete?). Commented Dec 1, 2010 at 15:01
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4@Justin Satyr Even if this post would have a thousand down votes Jeff would still not care so it doesn't really matter…– user146787Commented Jan 24, 2012 at 15:41
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4this answer is not useful (btw.: Headlines aren't whole sentences, but capitalized too). Commented Feb 7, 2012 at 22:33
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9Arguing that punctuation doesn't matter because it's ungrammatical... I'm not sure that's going to mollify anyone bothered by this. Commented Feb 24, 2012 at 1:12
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4Is the company's name officially "stack exchange inc."? Does the company use lowercase letters for its name in its legal documents? Commented Nov 20, 2014 at 19:59
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@pacoverflow You'll be pleased to know this has been fixed long ago, also: meta.stackexchange.com/q/243913/13 ;-) Commented Mar 6, 2017 at 6:12
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@userunknown Headlines are almost always all-capitalized! Commented Sep 25 at 22:53
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@SnackExchange: Where - in books, in newspapers? My impression is: rarely. They are rarely capitalized - it happens, yes - it might depend on genre, length of the headline, closeness to whole sentences. Most of the time, they are not. Commented Sep 26 at 14:42
status-completenow, since the current format is capitalized?