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I find myself browsing the site daily and shaking my head in frustration with the number of people who incorrectly capitalize/case "WordPress" in their question titles. It's highlighted pretty well at the top of the page ... but people still miss it.

Having so many questions and blocks of text on the site with this horrendous mis-use of the name of the product we all love is a travesty! We need to do something to fix it!

Short of having moderators go through each and every post ... I'd like to offer the following feature request options for discussion:

  1. Port the capital_P_dangit filter to Stack Exchange. Everyone knows and loves the little filter in WordPress that automatically converts "Wordpress" to its correct spelling. Why not add it here as well? I have confidence there will be little to no controversy surrounding this feature.
  2. Make the spell checker more annoying when it sees "WordPress" mis-typed. The spell checker correctly highlights "Wordpress" and "wordpress" when you type them in the editor and suggests "WordPress" as the correct spelling. Is this really enough? Why not add a JavaScript alert that asks the question/answer author if they're really sure they want to abuse the product's name before publishing? I think people will see this less as annoying and more as a useful reminder.
  3. Add a case sensitive search option. It's actually pretty easy to go in and revise mis-typed questions and answers ... but only if you know where they are. Unfortunately, searches are case-insensitive and return "WordPress" as a match for "Wordpress." If the site had an option to flag the search for case-sensitivity, it would make finding offending questions/answers much easier.

Thoughts?

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  • 1
    HA! But you're missing the obvious solution: convince Peter Mortensen to use WordPress...
    – Shog9
    Oct 24, 2011 at 21:46
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    I HATE the capital_P_dangit() with the fire of a thousand burning suns.
    – Chip Bennett
    Oct 24, 2011 at 23:39
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    Apparently the humor I intended with that line was lost. If ya'll remember, I was one of the more vocal opponents of that filter in the first place. Was just trying to be funny :-) The only reason I suggested editing the spelling in the first place is because I know (at least for me personally) it's far less encouraging to answer questions for people who obviously don't care enough to take the extra 1/2 second to properly capitalize words. If they don't care enough ... why will I spend time answering? Personal gut reaction ... but I thought it might be more common.
    – EAMann
    Oct 25, 2011 at 13:22
  • Heh. This was more or less start of my (crappy) morning and I wasn't overly open to humour. :) I hope you understand that my answer there is aggressive to the concept, rather than to you and your suggestion personally.
    – Rarst
    Oct 25, 2011 at 13:29
  • Guess I need to recalibrate my humor parser. :)
    – Chip Bennett
    Oct 25, 2011 at 15:18
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    While we're at it, add capital_S_dangit() for JavaScript! BTW, +1 for your proper capitalization of that fine language in your question!
    – Morgan Estes
    Oct 17, 2013 at 18:22

1 Answer 1

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I have confidence there will be little to no controversy surrounding this feature.

Over my dead body. How is this for some controversy?

capital_P_dangit() for me is a symbol of shallow obsession with details, turned into crusade and stomping on people who never asked for it.

I am fine with teaching correct spelling via comments. I am fine with editing it in, even if on personal level I think that is unwanted and we have a lot of more important issues to spend time on.

I am absolutely against any and all automated measures that will correct this automatically or pester users about it.

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    I'll edit it in - if I'm already making other edits to a question; otherwise, I just ignore it, because "in normal text, writers can safely ignore corporate aberrations in spacing and capitalization".
    – Chip Bennett
    Oct 25, 2011 at 12:15
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    @Chip agreed. editing post just to correct capitalization makes relatively less sense than correcting it in the process of other cleanup.
    – Rarst
    Oct 25, 2011 at 12:19
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    Mostly I agree. But often times, I'll go through to edit all of the capitalization and some of the grammar at the same time. Reading "i cant figureout what wordpress is doign" is far too distracting for me. But editing just for the sake of capitalizing "WordPress" ... I have to be in a weird mood to care that much :-)
    – EAMann
    Oct 25, 2011 at 16:20

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