Talk:List of principal leaders of the Crusades

message: I know this article existed in French, but is it really all that useful? We can get this info from the categories or from the individual crusade articles...it should also be "principal crusaders" but I'm not sure that's a good title either. Adam Bishop 04:32, 25 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: (I always misspell principal/principle...) Do you still object to this article? I know I began it and then stopped b/c I too began to doubt its usefulness, but I see now that you've begun expanding it. Srnec 17:57, 21 June 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I'm not sure, actually I was just bored and procrastinating, so I started listing all the crusaders I could find. But now what? Do we include everyone mentioned on Wikipedia who ever went on crusade, even if they weren't one of the "principal" crusaders? I started listing natives of the crusader states too, but should they be here, or should it just be people from the west? Adam Bishop 19:21, 21 June 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Untitled 

message: Why would crusaders be spelled with a capital C? These are people who went on a crusade, be it the First Crusade or the Fifth Crusade doesn't matter. Similarly, a list of principal warriors would not use Warriors, even though they fought in the American Civil War, the Thirty Year War, or the Second World War. The Crusaders are a band, the crusaders are peole on a crusade. Fram (talk) 04:34, 2 July 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: No, the Crusades are distinct from various other crusades, like Margaret Sanger's birth control crusade, the crusade for abortion rights, the crusade for this, the crusade for that, etc. "Crusade" has become a common noun, so that it is necessary to distinguish the Crusades proper by capitalisation. "The Crusaders" the band requires the definite article (capitalised), which marks it as a band. Srnec (talk) 05:05, 2 July 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: The Crusades are distinct, the crusaders are not. There are wars on drugs, terror, ... distinct from "real" wars, but the people involved are not capitalized in one and not in the other. Edward Gibbon, to name one distinct historian, uses "crusaders" throughout his "Decline and Fall". A book like the "New Concise History of the Crusades" from 2005 uses "crusaders". In the end, we have to follow the lead of the WP:MOSCAP and of the major English dictionaries, which all use "crusaders", not "Crusaders", as far as I can see. If you feel that "list of principal crusaders" is unclear in its scope, then the title should be changed to "list of principal people in the Crusades" or something similar. But introducing an error to make the meaning or distintion clearer is not correct. Fram (talk) 07:16, 2 July 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: I don't think there is any standard for this; Madden uses "crusaders" as Fram says, but Tyerman, for instance, uses "Crusaders". Riley-Smith uses "crusaders" while Hamilton uses "Crusaders", etc etc. There isn't even a standard for "Crusades" vs. "crusades". I think the uncapitalized version was fine; context makes it obvious that this is not an article about the Campus Crusade for Christ or whatever else. (Perhaps the article simply needs to exist in some other form...right now it's just a list of people with Wikipedia articles who went on crusade, which is not all that useful.) Adam Bishop (talk) 07:31, 2 July 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: I still think capitalisation is best, for clarity. And how much is capitalisation a decision of authors and not editors? I think that a list of all figures that went on Crusade about whom we have an article might be a useful list, but if not, then scrap it; and if it needs a better form, then so be it; I'll even assist. All told, I'm not much attached to this issue or article. Srnec (talk) 03:14, 3 July 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: Crusaders or crusaders?