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Star Trek Into Pedantry

Star Trek Into Darkness capitalization controversy ridiculed

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image icon The xkcd cartoon on the Star Trek Into Darkness dispute

The comic xkcd drew attention to one of Wikipedia's bitter title debates on 30 January 2013 with this cartoon. The topic: the capitalisation or non-capitalisation of the word "into" in the title of the upcoming Star Trek film, Star Trek Into Darkness. The question had generated tens of thousands of words of discussion on the article's talk page, as well as various subpages.

Given that Wikipedia's Manual of Style directs that prepositions with four letters or less should not normally be capitalised in titles, the discussion hinged on whether "Star Trek into darkness" should be understood as a single phrase, like "the journey into space", or whether the word "into" marked the beginning of a subtitle whose first word should be capitalised. Another factor was that the film's makers and most media reports capitalised the word "Into" in the film's title. A minority view also advocated that it should be seen as a subtitle (like other Star Trek movies) and therefore needed a colon, i.e. "Star Trek: Into Darkness".

In his Daily Dot article, titled "Wikipedians wage war over a capital 'I' in a 'Star Trek' film", Morris summarized the entire affair in the quote above, and cited User:Frungi to give his readers a brief summary of arguments in favour of an upper-case or lower-case spelling, saying he did not want want his readers to experience in "excruciating detail the main arguments from both sides. They are exhaustive and pedantic to such an extent that 'pedantic' no longer seems a suitable adjective."

Frungi's summary, compiled on 11 January, read:

Arguments for the lowercase I
“Into Darkness” may not be a subtitle, and “Star Trek into Darkness” may have been intended to be read as a sentence.
Assuming it’s not a subtitle, the MOS dictates a lowercase preposition.
Treating “into Darkness” as a subtitle without punctuation would be original research.
Allowing it to be interpreted as a subtitle would play into the studio's marketing.
The creator said that the title would not have a subtitle with a colon.
Arguments for the uppercase I
“Into Darkness” may be a subtitle, in line with the precedence of every Star Trek movie title longer than two words.
Assuming it is a subtitle, the MOS dictates the first word be capitalized.
Treating “Into Darkness” as part of a sentence would be original research.
Capitalizing the possible subtitle would allow it to be interpreted either way.
Every official, and the vast majority of secondary, sources capitalize it, and Wikipedia should follow this real-world use.
The sentence “Star trek into darkness” makes no grammatical sense.
The creator said that the title would have a subtitle rather than a number, and that the subtitle would not have a colon.

Morris chose to use a capital I throughout his article, saying he agreed with the passionate sentiments of an anonymous vandal who told Wikipedians to read the official website.

The Independent weighed in on the controversy a day later, on 31 January 2013 ("Trekkies take on Wikis in a grammatical tizzy over Star Trek Into Darkness"), asking its resident grammarian Guy Keleny to adjudicate.

Keleny acknowledged the ambiguity introduced by the missing colon, which allowed an interpretation of the title along the lines of "This is the story of the Star Trek into Darkness", but concluded:


Science fiction news site Blastr took much the same view. The title of the Wikipedia entry was changed from lower-case to upper-case spelling on 31 January.

What if the Wikipedia "revolution" was actually a reversion?

On 30 January 2013, Rebecca J. Rosen, senior associate editor of The Atlantic, reported on a paper by Jeff Loveland and Joseph Reagle which argues that rather than being a break with the past, Wikipedia and Wikipedians are actually part of a long tradition of "obsessive compilers" that created "not just encyclopedias, but dictionaries, medical texts, histories, and even object collections, such as herbaria". Loveland and Reagle note a commonality between the methods used to build Wikipedia and various "encyclopedias of old":


Piracy and other types of "borrowing" in such endeavours were common. Ephraim Chambers' 1728 Cyclopaedia "borrowed heavily from the Dictionnaire de Trevoux," and in turn was reprinted in full by Scottish "pirates". Chambers himself confessed that the Cyclopaedia contained "little ... new, and of my own growth."


Wikipedia's collaborative approach, too, is really a function of the size of the task, and has its precedents in previous projects of comparable magnitude. Something very much like a crowdsourcing approach was used to compile the Oxford English Dictionary for example. Thousands of people contributed to the effort, sending in slips of paper noting words in their context. Diderot's and d'Alembert's encyclopedia had over 140 different contributors.

Jeff Loveland, a historian of encyclopedias, had previously reviewed Reagle's book Good Faith Collaboration: The Culture of Wikipedia and criticized it for having "one major weakness, namely in historical contextualization" (see report in the 28 November 2011 issue of the Signpost). The ensuing discussions between Loveland and Reagle led to this collaboration.

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