[bonoboTP]

Wikipedia often rejects corporate case styling and uses the sane "first letter upper case, others lowercase" for some brands. For example Wikipedia writes Nvidia instead of NVIDIA, although the company always capitalizes its name without exception.

[xiaq]

No, Wikipedia does not make the judgement call on whether to "reject" corporate case styling on its own, it follows what is "in widespread use":

> Follow standard English text formatting and capitalization practices, even if the trademark owner considers nonstandard formatting "official", as long as this is a style already in widespread use, rather than inventing a new one: (But see exception below under § Trademarks that begin with a lowercase letter.)

> use: Time, Kiss, Asus, Sony Mobile. (Capitalize IKEA, IBM, as acronyms/initialisms.)

> avoid: TIME, KISS, ASUS, SONY Mobile

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style/Trad...

[ghaff]

One thing that entry does not cover is all lower-case names. Although a couple things I looked up (gnuplot, xkcd), Wikipedia does seen to respect all lower-case. I'm not sure how many companies actually have all lower-case names--even if their logo is all lower-case. And my observation is that even many projects that are nominally lower-case, aren't very consistent about it as in the current example.

[EE84M3i]

Relevant Manual of Style entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style/Trad...

[bonoboTP]

Quite arbitrary. They disallow all caps ASUS and NVIDIA, but allow all-lowercase xkcd, because I guess xkcd is "ours" while big corps are the "Other".

[xiaq]

That is not true.

> Follow standard English text formatting and capitalization practices, even if the trademark owner considers nonstandard formatting "official", as long as this is a style already in widespread use, rather than inventing a new one: (But see exception below under § Trademarks that begin with a lowercase letter.)

> use: Time, Kiss, Asus, Sony Mobile. (Capitalize IKEA, IBM, as acronyms/initialisms.)

> avoid: TIME, KISS, ASUS, SONY Mobile

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style/Trad...

[ghaff]

Not sure. There's GNU after all. Wikipedia's "arbitrary" standard is actually pretty common in my experience. But I'm not sure I could come up with a coherent explanation as to why.

[bonoboTP]

GNU is an acronym, that's fine. But if they insist on Nvidia, they should also insist on Xkcd (it's not an acronym, just an unpronounceable artificial word).

[ghaff]

And radar is an acronym too and it's not commonly capitalized although SCSI is. And, often, Fortran, not FORTRAN. I'm not making a case for how things should be. I'm just observing how they commonly are in style guides, etc.

I think part of it is a general stylistic distaste for having "unnecessary" caps. See also general shift away from "Open Source," "Big Data," and the like.