http://www.metal-archives.com/bands/Omission/56040
Maybe this is a more appropriate place to ask than the site related questions thread (which is the thread I previously asked this question in, but no one answered). In the lyrical themes of that band, should it say "Inner Feelings" or "Inner feelings"? I'm guessing it's the latter as in the cause of death field only the first letter should be capitalized ("Car accident", not "Car Accident"), but with the lyrical themes I'm not completely sure.

I believe that I read somewhere that it's individual preference, but I don't really remember ...

Most users - including myself, use a different syntax for genres/lyrical themes (bands) and specialised genres (labels). There was never an official ruling for this, but in my opinion, it greatly enhances readability.

So, I'd be putting "Inner Feelings". The cause of death field is something else... I'd be capitalising that in a similar fashion, but Morrigan's explicitly given a rule on how that field is meant to be capitalised.

Well, considering that everything else in the band information area capitalizes every word (band names, locations, genre(s), etc. [although most are proper nouns ... ] I'd say it's only "right" to do so with lyrical themes.

I prefer to capitalise every item in the list, but adhere to normal rules for each item. So it would be "Inner feelings" for me. Same for member roles, btw. I also don't see any reason why we should capitalise the cause of death any differently.

The genre field... yeah well, that's sort of a volatile topic.

Locations are obviously capitalised for being proper nouns. Genres in other fields normally are not, since they are not proper nouns.

Wait, I did what??

Does anyone know if this album is correctly capitalized or not?
http://www.metal-archives.com/albums/Um ... etal/43592

Oh, I thought he was still talking about lyrical themes. Nevermind.

Well, if the genre is capitalized (even if not a proper noun), then it should be only right to capitalize lyrical themes, if only for consistency. Of course, this is only my opinion. Perhaps an official ruling from Morri and/or HellBlazer?

Antioch asked me about this report: http://www.metal-archives.com/report/view/id/407259
He mentioned ...and Oceans as an example.

Since ellipses are rarely used to begin proper titles, it's not written specifically, but I believe "...On the Night" should be capitalized. "and" is a coordinating conjunction, and while "on" could be used as a preposition, I interpreted this title as using "on" being a phrasal verb. The name could be interpreted either way, but I believe it is correct to interpret this fragment as having a verb rather than not having a verb, since it makes sense as a more complete statement there (or does the ellipsis show intent for it to be a fragment without a verb?).

Perhaps this is a matter of interpretation, but it should be brought up for discussion, thanks to Antioch for prompting that.

For this band you can clearly see on their Myspace they do not capitalize the article and in their name, so I don't know. It could be band preference or it could depend if the use of an ellipsis is to suggest a broken sentence (in which case the article. conjunction, or preposition following it should remain lowercase) or if the name is intended to be considered as a start of a new sentence, so-to-speak, in which case it would be uppercase.

http://www.metal-archives.com/bands/...and_Oceans/231
http://www.myspace.com/andoceans1

Let's not get carried away here. Don't know about you guys but I think it's way too much to ponder what set of sentences the name could be a fragment of and applying all kinds of convoluted rules to the end product. I know we should try to be consistent, but there's such a thing as getting too worked up about the details. These are rare cases and we can deal with them one at a time without needing to be absolutely sure and in accordance with the more general cap rules every single time.

The ellipsis suggests that it's considered a fragment of a larger imaginary phrase, so I would suggest dealing with those two as if they were. Thus "and" lowercase and "on" lowercase too (I'm not going to conjecture about whether it's part of a phrasal verb or just a preposition, sorry, but that goes to far; better to go with the more general rule for prepositions when in doubt).

This capitalization stuff is getting unnecessarily tedious sometimes.

All I can say is that capitalizing genres in the field the way MA handles it is a leftover from common practice in the earlier days that stuck. It's not based on any clear rules, just a "we did it before and have done it ever since" (and also aesthetic) kind of thing. Opinions are divided among the staff. (See Napero )

Anyway, they should not be viewed as a precedent for other fields.

For example, I disagree with Az and believe that items in a list should be capitalized, regardless: "Inner Feelings" instead of "Inner feelings." It's not something that has a consensus among staff, and for the most part, we tend to leave the practice of it as it is (both for genres, lyrical themes, and other such listings). Such a focus on small issue capitalization really isn't necessary; we'd rather see you put that effort towards bigger tasks (reports, the "other stuff to do" lists).

Now it's ok.

Anybody familiar with Italian want to verify my accuracy here?

Sly93, contact Uncolored for anything Italy-related.

I'd be interested in knowing how to capitalize Ukrainian as well. Last.fm apparently redirects "First Letter, Every Word" style track titles to "First letter, first word" style at least for Nokturnal Mortum and Drudkh, but that might be automated. I have no idea if they know what they're doing, but seems to me a few proper nouns are in lower case in their corrections. Then again, I don't even know if proper nouns are capitalized in Ukrainian.

Generally, as in most languages, only the first word of the title should be capitalized plus, of course, proper nouns. I think we should make a list of languages where not only the first word is capitalized as there's not so many of them (English, German, Portuguese, any more?) instead of asking about each language here.

What's correct German capitalization for "Der Tanz Für Den Teufel"?

^Der Tanz für den Teufel

Alright, thanks.

That's not an automated redirect, mate.

When a track is first submitted to Last.fm, the server records the title and artist tags that're embedded in the file and uses it to display that title in future. Meaning if some fucking idiot is the first to get hold of a track and fills out the tags in ALL CAPS, then they're submitted and stored in the database that way too.

It CAN be modified by the site moderation though; there's an entire thread nearly 1000 pages strong full of requests for capitalisation fixes.

What rules apply to spanish band names?
http://www.metal-archives.com/report/vi ... 0/show/all
All capitalized or the normal rules of titles? or a mix of that?

The "de" should definitely not be capitalized. I've never been able to find a definite guide for band names in Spanish, but it's conventionally similar to English.

Well, I just wonder if it should be "Un Tipo de Langostino" or "Un tipo de langostino"...
But I guess for band names we shouldn't take exactly the same rules as for song titles since only capitalizing the first word of a band name looks kinda stupid.

I've already corrected the entry to what I'd think is the proper capitalization.


Pretty much. Band names don't seem to conform to the same rules as composition titles and any guides or texts dealing with it appear to be rare, vague and/or incomplete. Probably because it's mostly a non-issue for names, as they are rarely more complex phrases. As I said, by convention most languages and bands stick to the English way of formatting titles -or at least the particular way English uses too-, capitalize almost everything except articles, some prepositions, conjunctions, etc... Kind of case-by-case too, maybe.

As a non-metal example, when have you last seen it spelled "Die toten Hosen" somewhere?

Actually, that only applies to ascii letters. It's said in that very post:


Semi-recently they started (automatedly, I think, because of the work load, but I haven't verified this) processing non-ascii titles so that eg. Небесное серебро Перуна redirects to Небесное серебро перуна. They're still technically different tracks and they will appear as such if you have autocorrection off.

Erh yeah, I'm aware of that, but I didn't want to overload the guy with too much of an explanation.

I would like to confirm if the capitalization on this album I added is correct. I think it is but linguistic really isn't my strong.

Now it is. For English, capitalize everything except articles (a, an, the), prepositions of less than five letters, and coordinating conjunctions of less than five letters. Than is subordinating, and by Wikipedia's standards (which this site follows), it should be uppercase, regardless of the number of letters. His is an adjective or pronoun, and should always be uppercase.

EDIT: Oh, and, because there's an ellipsis before the word and in the title and track 2, it gives the implication that there are words missing (a fragment), and so it isn't capitalized.

I read the wiki page but I really didn't get all of it, thus my question. I don't really know how to distinguish coordinating from subordinating and stuff like that. The ellipsis thing and the his thing I think I understood.

Coordinating: and, but, or, yet, for, nor, and so; subordinating.

I'll keep that in mind for future submissions. Thanks!

How are Polish titles to be capitalized?
http://www.metal-archives.com/albums/Sa ... nie/368156
http://www.metal-archives.com/report/vi ... 4/show/all

http://www.metal-archives.com/albums/Sa ... nie/368186
http://www.metal-archives.com/report/vi ... 3/show/all

Well, here's what Rate Your Music has to say. PiotrB changed them yesterday, so I'm assuming they're correct, given that he's a native Polish speaker.

Anyone know the rules for Slovenian?

You should ask http://www.metal-archives.com/users/rojci666

For Slovenian but also for Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian, Macedonian and Montenegro don't have publication/composition titles in capitalized letters like English, they have just the rule of sentence case (capitalization of only the first word and proper nouns - like rules for Italy in the first post of the thread).
Capitalization page 21 : http://goo.gl/VRmUq

I will start fixing this...