There is a requested move in progress proposing moving the names of some Royal Navy ship types to lower case titles. If you understand what constitutes a proper noun, and the Wikipedia guidelines on capitalisation, please wade in. The discussion is being mainly conducted at Talk:Motor Gun Boat. Shem talk , 21 October UTC. In an international encyclopedia like Wikipedia, it is inevitable that some article titles will have to use language that is only correct in a subset of the various national varieties of a language and is not correct in all of them.
This will force Wikipedia to show case by case a limited amount of favoritism to one national variety or another; and while this is unavoidable and therefore perfectly acceptable, it should be recognized as favoritism. It is often found that the first line of the introductory paragraph of an article reintroduces the title term in bold; and in cases where national varieties differ on the term for the title subject, I propose that we adopt a standard notation that shows as little further favoritism as possible to the national variety used for the title.
I propose that the standard notation be: TermA or TermB. Some articles have taken to mentioning by name the regions which use a national variety different from that used in the title. I recently edited the article for cesium fluoride to this proposed standard; previously, it had read: caesium fluoride or cesium fluoride in North America.
The problem here is that the article calls out North America by name even while it uses the term "or" to denote the existence of multiple possibilities. This implies heavily that the there are multiple possibilities in North America; and by extension that the title term "caesium fluoride" is correct everywhere, whereas the national variety "cesium fluoride" is rather a mere colloquialism used by North Americans in place of the standard term.
In reality most North Americans aware of the existence of cesium are unaware of the existence of any spellings of the word with an 'a;' and the academics who might know otherwise nevertheless use "cesium fluoride" and not the British spelling.
