Hi! This has been an unclear situation in the past, as can be seen by the comments on the 2017 Capitalization of join phrases topic. It came up again with Edit #83152674 and I thought I’d actually start a poll to figure out what people think and possibly make the guidelines more specific on this, at least for English.
When we have an artist credit on a release like “Artist X Featuring Artist Y” or “Artist X In Duo With Artist Y”, should we:
Follow the release: “Artist X Featuring Artist Y”
Lowercase, since it’s not a title: “Artist X featuring Artist Y”
Just a more general remark: something really helpful to establish (via vote or whatever) would be a list of rules for “on this follow what is printed” and “on this, don’t”. Collected in a single hyperlinked document in the documentation.
It’s not just “feat.” vs. “Feat.” (or “featuring” or “ft.” ou pourquoi pas “avec”), it’s capitalization (which yes I realize has docs), it’s weird tics like standardizing “a capella” or deciding when “mix” is capitalizable, things you want a simple yes/no on that isn’t easy to find (or doesn’t exist). The docs are pretty solid for what they do cover, and it’s impossible to cover everything I realize, but I think what I’m describing is a standard.
I think the join phrase as presented on the release should be preserved (whether it’s “feat.” ,“featuring,” “with,” etc.), but capitalized according to language-specific rules (I haven’t been able to conceive a case where the join phrase would be capitalized, but there may be one). This would be consistent with MB’s capitalization rules everywhere else, so why not here?
Except for Japanese releases where they have consistency in the capitalisation they purposely use, and we have a guideline saying we follow as printed.
We should just follow the language style.
If it’s a title, there is that Funkey Camel Title Style, and if like here, it is not a title, then proper nouns are Capitalised, but not the other words.
I think the “a capella” is just a guess case deal, isn’t it? I don’t think there’s any standardizing rule for that. Mix is always lower case if it’s in the ETI. The rules plainly state all words except those that would normally be capitalized are lowercase. Nothing in ETI should be uppercase except for proper nouns basically.
I think what @crappy refers to is that “a cappella” can be found as “acappella”, “a capella”, “acapella”, and several other variants. I personally tend to leave them as they are written, but there is definitely an argument for whether it falls under Error Correction.
I realize that, but if any of the variants are on a release when you hit the guess case button, it changes all of them to “a capella”. I think that gets mistaken for guideline to make them that way.
Well, the results here are fairly conclusive. I added a section for this to the artist credit guideline. Does anyone have an example of an artist credit with a join phrase that should be capitalized (for example because of it containing a German noun)?
It’s my understanding that all nouns are normally capitalized in German (learned something new today!). In light of that, I think (since *"Duett"* is always capitalized in German)
might be better as (since nouns are always capitalized in German).
It is also hard for those whose mother tongue is German!