Not Derailing the Thread

[Liam W]

It's a title; that's why. Additionally, unless they are at the beginning or end of the title, prepositions, such as "the," aren't capitalized. However, let's save that for another time and not derail the thread.

Certain other words seem to incorrectly capitalised as well... I never captialised words such as 'then' and 'if' in titles.

I remember my Year 4 English teacher talking about titular casing...

Liam

 

[Amaury]

It depends on what you go by, really. I go by the Chicago Manual of Style, which states that you don't capitalize prepositions unless they are at the beginning or end of the title regardless of length.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_prepositions

However, it gets more complicated when one word can sometimes be capitalized and sometimes not. Although I'm not sure if this is from other manuals of styles or all of them (which would include Chicago's).

As an example, "up" is a preposition, but it can be capitalized or not in a title depending on its context.

• I Walked up the Mountain
  • Not capitalized because it's literal
• I Looked Up a Word
  • Capitalized because it's figurative

This can probably explain it a hell of a lot better than I can: http://www.quickanddirtytips.com/education/grammar/capitalizing-titles

 

[Tracy Perry]

And the final word in the matter
WGARA.
Oh, that's right. That's an acronym.

 

[imthebest]

Well my native language is spanish and in spanish for titles you only capitalize the first letter of the sentence and not each first letter for each word.

When I was looking for a spanish language pack I found that every translator incorretly followed the english rule of capitalizing each first word in a title so for example: "Mark Forums As Read" was being traslated to "Marcar Foros Como Leídos" when in fact it should be "Marcar foros como leídos".

That's why at the end I made my own translation and manually translated every phrase (only for the frontend).

To my very own preference having the first letter of each word inside a title capitalized looks ugly and cluttered.

 

[Amaury]

It can be done either way, so there's no one correct way.