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Relevant Manual of Style entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style/Trademarks#General_rules https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_

• bonoboTP 5y ago
  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".
  • ghaff 5y ago
    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 5y ago
      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 5y ago
        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.
  • xiaq 5y ago
    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/Trademarks#General_rules https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style/Trad...