Little style thing, do we think we should capitalise Sittstart or go with sittstart? Personally I prefer capitalisation i.e. using title-case for climb names, but if there's a strong local precedent for a different style I'd be persuaded.
So title case is the norm in English, while sentence case is the norm in Norwegian, Swedish and lots of others. English being so prominent means title case also spills over a lot, leading to a mess. There's also the note in the style guide "Capitalize names exactly as originally published."
I feel like the only way to clean up, is to disregard the way anyone refers to sits, stands, droits, gauches, and add our own standard way or doing it, but that might be toublesome as well?
I'd go for Blade Runner Sit by default, unless there's consistently applied and widely-used local language precedent, e.g. Le Carnage assis
Having done a bit more background reading, I think we should lean into "maintain local orthography". Selfishly speaking names that aren't title-cased feel a bit wrong, but it seems like that's just my english bias.
So I'd propose the following basic rules:
Just gonna ignore German for the moment as they seem to have some horrendously hard to implement rules 😅
Downside of this approach is i think it's going to be really hard to implement consistently, so we're likely signing ourselves up for a lifetime of pain trying to keep this info accurate. Might be able to do something clever using crag locations and some tools? Gonna be messy though.
I wouldn’t sweat it too much on the case conventions. It’s an English language site so I think it would be fine to Title Case everything, even the Font ‘assis’ stuff, if internal consistency is the goal. Although, like in English, you’d need to be careful not to title case particles, eg. L'Insoutenable Légèreté de l'Être.
For me accuracy feels like a pretty important part of CH. I think if locals spell a name a certain way then we should aspire to match how it is generally refered to rather than applying our own style over the top. Interested in others thoughts and opinions though.
So I've just spent 6 months editing a book, in English, including lots of citations that are not in English. I've used Oxford University Press (OUP) style throughout for capitalisation. So, whereas in US style you would title case the name of a cited book, but not in OUP – we sentence case it. It doesn't matter if the book is published in the US or the UK, I'm going to be consistent and use sentence case. Same for a French book – no idea what the convention is in France and it doesn't matter, because I'm using sentence case. Obviously in German, I need to capitalise the nouns regardless, because that's not an editorial convention, it's just how German works.
Climb names function as proper nouns, so under OUP style they retain their established capitals, akin to title case, unless intentionally stylised, e.g. MaDMAn.
On this item:
I think if locals spell a name a certain way then we should aspire to match how it is generally refered to
Having thought about it, if sittstart is the local term and spelling, we should use that, not sit start. So I think the approach should be: respect local language, but use a consistent editorial convention for orthography. The exception to the local language rule is when it comes to non-Latin scripts, we should always be using the romanised transliteration. The site would become unusable for most people if it were mixing up Korean, Greek, Russian, Japanese and Chinese scripts. Adding these as 'other names', as we do today, is the best solution.
Where it gets mildly interesting is the subject of variations on a climb, denoted by assis etc. Bleau.info lowercase this but title case the rest of the name. I think this is a helpful convention as it makes clear the variation is subordinate to the main climb – assis is a qualifier, not the proper noun. I couldn't find any earlier precedent in climbing for this approach – none of the older guides have any consistency of orthography (or any sit starts 😀). An example outside of climbing would be Guernica (study), which is a similar kind of thing. Now I've thought about it, I think it would make sense to adopt this approach across the site for consistency.
Top style guide knowledge 💪 I'm convinced. Consistent title case also makes our lives a lot easier than having to remember lots of local rules and variations.
Im going to update the style guide on climb names as folows
current
The name chosen by the first ascentionist is authoritive though discretion is advised e.g. around misspelling. Prefer title-case for climb names. Retain local orthography.
new
The name chosen by the first ascentionist is authoritive though discretion is advised e.g. around misspelling. Use title-case for climb names, except qualifiers (
sit start,left,rightetc.) which are always lower-case. Use local qualifiers (assis,bas,gauche) NOT english qualifiers. For climbs with names in non-latin scripts use romanised transliteration and add the real name asOther Namemeta data.
Sorted all this. Also updated the code which auto-cases names when you're adding a new climb etc. which should help with sticking to the style guide.