Talk:Bell hooks/Archive 3

message: :I have violated the letter of the preceding instruction by substing in an  template on the second-to-last contrib of the discussion. --Jerzy•t 00:23, 27 August 2008 (UTC)

message: In the previous section, i describe myself as having already 
: restored (without investigating ...)
but i'm still about to restore a previous version of the lead sentence, and now have investigated its replacement.
# For three months (from July of '05) the lead sent opened with my
#:: The person known variously as bell hooks, Bell Hooks, and Gloria Watkins
#:(sustained by a reg'd ed's reversion of one IP's sarcastic vandalism).
# A then 6-month veteran of WP (now inactive for 7 months) rewrote those words as
#: Gloria Watkins ... better known as bell hooks or Bell Hooks
#For four months that version went undisturbed; i restored "or Bell Hooks" after 6 hours by reverting the first two edits of a new editor (who eventually totaled 12 edits over 32 days).
# 9 hours later, a new editor (with an arguably similar ID) did their only 15 edits, the first of which included changing to beginning the lead sentence to
#:: bell hooks (born September 25, 1952), nee Gloria Jean Watkins,... 
#:(but the edits 4 and then another 16 minutes later, the only ones on WP from that IP, are presumably by the same person).  
# About a month later, User:B. Phillips (as they state in the previous section) upper-cased the first word in sentences and lower-cased Black. About 17 days later, a new IP made their only edit, downcasing two first-word references to her name, including the lead-sentence one.
# Six days later, a long-term reg'd ed made an edit upcasing "Hooks" (as second word in the lead), and reverted himself in the next minute; 40 hours later, a new IP downcased 6 first-word references, and 15 minutes later made their only other two edits, the msg in the previous section that i struck thru as incoherant whenever on-topic. (I did the strike thru over 12 hours ago, in an edit-screen that i lost, without any thot about whether the contrib had edited the article or not; i reconstructed the strike-thru a few hours ago, before undertaking this investigation to test my hypothesis that the visual awkwardness of having a ref to the pen name start the article was an incitement to "vandalistic advocacy" by random registered and IP editors, in contrast to "The person..." or "Gloria Watkins". The common authorship of the three edits is something i discovered only in the last half hour (the one before reaching this point in the edit).
# Nine days later, a reg'd ed'r (for the preceding 23 days and 4 edits; they've edited twice more since, each after a month or two without) took the s off one instance of "hooks's".
# Another 14 days later, an IP with 29 months and 80 edits thru a few days ago downcased 2 first-word refs to her, and unwikified 7 presumably blue lks. (2 of these, after someone restored them and i noted them in the course of an unrelated edit, needed piping away from rdrs that led to dict-defs, but most seem desirable to me.) 
# The next day , an IP's 2nd edit (1st was 44 days earlier to Cornel West, who's lk'd from her article and talk; no further ones since) downcased a first-word ref] to her.
# Six days later an ed'r reg'd 3 weeks, as their third edit (the last was 4 days later) downcased a first-word ref] to her.
# Almost 2 months later, about 0600, a 1-month, 10-edit IP does his 11th, on this page. (Eventually, i WP:RNA-edit it.) 
# Almost 12 hours later, L2B, known on this talk page, in two edits upcased 12 first-word refs to her.
# Not quite 6 hours later, an IP editor newly minted 32 seconds before up-cased her surname as the second word of a sentence, reverts, and does their 4th & final edit at the 1 minute, 38 second mark. ("We await the ruling of the judges as to whether this is a new record for life-time editing rate.") 
# 18 minutes later, the RPA'd ed'r edited the article this time, removing the Lowercase tag & upcasing each of 4 occurences of "Hooks" as a subsequent word in its sentence.
# About 30 hours later, an editor who's now at 5 months and about 70 edits downcased 5 first-word occurences.
# 5 days on, an IP w/o previous edits downcased another 5 first-word occurences.
# 6 minutes later, a user-page-less reg'd user in their 2nd of 4 edits in their 26 hour career downcased another 4 first-word occurences.
# After 6 days, a 4-month registered user, now at abt 1000 edits, restored the Lowercase tag.
# The next day , a presently fairly active IP editor (probably not recently sharing the IP; current edit count in middle 3 figures) upcased both words of the lead-sentence name.
# And the next day, a steady contributor (about 1500 over almost 2 years, with a very public identity, but (still) unseen on talk:Bell hooks) downcased the same two words], with the summary
#: rv - the subject is properly spelled in lower-case
# About 9 days later, a brand-new IP blanked the page, was reverted by AntiVandalBot in under 2 seconds, and settled for radically shortening it; the previous steady contributor rv'd it again after about 2.5 hours. (The IP has so far been seen further only when responding abusively to his vandalism warning.) 
# After 5 days, another brand-new IP upcased both words in the lead-sentence name, and one subsequent-word surname; within an hour, the same steady contributor rv'd
# In about 2 hours, another brand-new IP up-cased the same two words, and inserted vandalism; L2B removed the vandalism in under an hour, and the steady contrib down-cased 13 hours later, completing the reversion
# After 12 days, a heavy editor over the last 2.5 years upcased 9 first-word refs, saying
#: sentences begin with capital letters, even names that start with miniscule letters 
# 8 days later, another brand-new IP made 4 edits to the article and has since become known on this talk page by starting the  
#:: == New, and large, revisions == 
#: section as the last WP contribution of their so-far 74-minute editing career; two of those edits lower-cased the ref in the lead-sentence and her name in the title of (and thus falsified our account of) the Z Magazine article
# 5 days later a user-page-less reg'd user with a few dozen edits over 1.5 years lower-cased her given name in the first word of the lead-sent, summarizing 
#: edited bell hooks to conform with (im)proper capitalization
# 3 days later a reg'd user with about 150 edits over 8 months down-cased a first-word ref to her, summarized
#: capitalization change
# 6 days later i did two section edits, up-casing a first-word ref to her, converting a "hooks's" to "hooks' " and (whoops!) another the reverse (intending to promote consistency, ha!), converting a number of references to her name into pronouns, replacing smart-quotes, and transfering onto the talk page a sentence in need of verification, as explaing on talk, with summaries:
#* rem unverified & disputed sent per Talk:Bell hooks#Intent of her pen name; gr; no smart quotes; "Leftist" wd hv to be proper noun; reduce needlessly monotonous overuse of surnam 
#* down-case phrases that name movements that are not formal organizations; consistency re black & hooks'
I was correct in believing that the placement of a form of "bell hooks" at the head of the lead sentence corresponded to a serious acceleration of edits related to its casing, but my first impression is not of the causal link i expected.--Jerzy•t 00:39, 18 August 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: And i am forgoing for now returning to that earlier wording of the lead; watch the top-level section that includes this, for my further thots.--Jerzy•t 09:59, 18 August 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  A Year's History of Name Edits, esp. First Word in Lead Sentence 

message: I read though the prior discussion of casing, which has grown inconsistent again.  What I believe is the prior consensus—and what I also believe is correct—is to use hooks' preferred lowercasing as the rule, but to still follow English orthographic conventions about word-initial capitalization.  This rule is completely consistent with other non-upper names such as "da Vinci" and "van Rossum", which likewise become upper-cased in sentence-initial position ("Da Vinci was an artist..."; "Van Rossum created the Python programming language..."). LotLE×talk 21:22, 25 August 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Casing yet again