Disputatio:Corpora transneptuniana

Titulus articuli[fontem recensere]

Hello,
Why is the title of the article in the plural form? There is no reason a priori not to use the singular, corpus transneptunianum. By the way, it would certainly be useful to create the redirects from the names using "ultra-" instead of *trans-", to prevent us from having a duplicate article (look at the small exchange in the edits of this morning on 50000 Quaoar). Also, there is absolutely no reason to use a capital letter at the beginning of "ultra/transneptunian~". Andrew Dalby (and any other interested — sorry I don't know the people active here in this domain), an opinion on this?
Best regards,
SenseiAC (disputatio) 11:25, 22 Iunii 2016 (UTC)[reply]

You're quite right about the redirects -- I have created one of them just now. Thank you for your attention to this.

The answers to the other two points you raise are not absolutely clear-cut, I think: some might say that because Neptunus is capitalized as a proper name, compounds of it should be capitalized likewise. Such a rule is sometimes applied ... but I don't know whether we have ever discussed the matter here. Again, although singular is our normal rule for page titles, one could say that this page is about a defined group of objects and to force the first sentence to say "X is one of a group ..." rather than "X is a group ..." is just complicating things and wasting words. I'd love to see what others say about this! Andrew Dalby (disputatio) 11:48, 22 Iunii 2016 (UTC)[reply]

As for capitalizing: styles vary, though the trend in North America is probably to lowercase. Thus, we have Atlantic, but transatlantic (said Merriam-Webster before 1985), Pacific, but transpacific (ditto), and Semitism, but antisemitism (says the Holocaust Museum). IacobusAmor (disputatio) 13:49, 22 Iunii 2016 (UTC)[reply]

IacobusAmor you deal with English, but here we are dealing with Latin. I could say the rule in French (different from that in English) but this does not tell the rule in Latin either way. SenseiAC (disputatio) 14:02, 22 Iunii 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Latin is printed in many countries and printing styles vary a little from country to country. I don't know of any style guide written specifically for Latin. We generally try to follow a consensus of recent printed Latin, knowing that some editors will disagree, hoping that they will consider other matters more important and work together anyway :) Andrew Dalby (disputatio) 15:00, 22 Iunii 2016 (UTC)[reply]

On the capitalization-or-not question, no one else has commented. I simply wasn't sure -- I've never known a rule for this -- but I'll go along with Iacobus's North American trend and with SenseiAC to make it a consensus of three. No capitalization for "transneptunianus", "postromanus", and other such compounds. OK? Andrew Dalby (disputatio) 13:40, 23 Iunii 2016 (UTC)[reply]

The way you formulate the first sentence should not prevent from using the singular in the title, even if it is "easier" to use the plural form in the first sentence. But it is just my opinion. SenseiAC (disputatio) 11:55, 22 Iunii 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I find that the Wikipedias generally prefer singular titles for articles, except those about "classes of objects" (see for example en:Wikipedia:Naming conventions (plurals) and de:Wikipedia:Archiv/Richtlinien für die Namensgebung:Singular-Plural-Debatte). To take a third language, the rules in the French wiki (see fr:Wikipédia:Conventions sur les titres) are more positive about singulars than the English, but a plural exception suggested is fr:Anneaux de Saturne. Well, this is a similar case to that French one, and it is an article about a class of objects. So a plural title would certainly be permissible. Some wikis, though not the majority, actually do give this equivalent article a plural title, as we do. This suggests to me the following conclusion: nothing truly demands a change, but anyone wishing to rewrite and improve this article is free to decide that a singular title is among the desirable changes. Andrew Dalby (disputatio) 13:40, 23 Iunii 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Dictionaries & encyclopedias do usually define words in the singular, but certain collections, like the Twelve Days of Christmas, have to have a plural lemma, as do all taxonomic items above the level of genus. We could indeed speak of a coleopterum if we had in mind a particular beetle (the one crawling up my window screen), but our article describes the Coleoptera as a group, so its lemma has to be plural. Since, however, a transneptunian body is "any minor planet in the Solar System that orbits the Sun at a greater average distance (semi-major axis) than Neptune," the singular looks quite possible here. IacobusAmor (disputatio) 14:33, 23 Iunii 2016 (UTC)[reply]