Thread:RRabbit42/@comment-3477287-20140723152547/@comment-961279-20140803191306

The song titles section of the MOS is to provide consistency because no one else is consistent in how they do it, even what you might consider professional organizations. It has two parts: the italics and the capitalization.

Using italics can be traced back to typewriters. Before the 1960s, when you wanted to designate the title of a book or a song, you backed up the platen and put underscores underneath the words in the title. Once typewriters like the IBM Selectric and daisy wheel typewriters came long, you could change out the type element to get an oblique or italic typeface without having to move the paper over to a different typewriter and fuss with getting the paper to line up correctly. It's at this point that italics were used when writing a title instead of underlining. It made it easier to read because it helped the title stand out from the rest of the words without the line running through the descenders in letters like g and y ( running and January ).

For the capitalization, that came about because of how inconsistent they are in choosing which words to capitalize. Let's pick the Huey Lewis and the News song Hip to Be Square. Look at the page for the song on Wikipedia. The title of the page is written as Hip to Be Square, but if you look at the picture in the infobox, it should be Hip To Be Square with the T capitalized. Look around and you will probably find an official site like the record label that lists it as Hip to be Square because they don't consider "be" important enough to capitalize.

If I remember right, there was a different song that appeared twice on a CD's track list, and the song title wasn't capitalized the same on both of them. I would have considered that CD an official source for the song title, but it contradicted itself.

Regarding using italics, we probably could switch to putting quotation marks around the song titles and that would make them look like episode titles and save italics for album titles. But you have to remember that wikis are separate from each other. They can use ideas, guidelines, writing/formatting stytles and policies from other wikis, but they are not required to do so. They can determine what works best for themselves.

If you think we're alone in not following exactly what might be precise typography or grammar, take a look at the Oxford comma. Governments and organizations can't decide how to use a final comma.