Talk:Mafia/Archive 2

extension of term "Mafia"

The article says ;"Mafia" was originally applied to the Sicilian Mafia and originates in Sicily, but it has since expanded to encompass other organizations of similar methods and purpose, e.g., "the Russian Mafia" or "the Japanese Mafia". ' This implies that the current extended use is an extension of a Sicilian use. It seems to me that it is actually extended from the American use, which is how the word came into English. I have no reference to support this; is there a source among the 'references' for the statement as given in the article? --Richardson mcphillips (talk) 16:21, 29 April 2019 (UTC)

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• Mafia Monthly SBA filing.jpg

Participate in the deletion discussion at the nomination page. —Community Tech bot (talk) 03:54, 28 July 2021 (UTC)

Problem Not problem

The stylistic choices on this page are unclear: when writing "the word 'mafia'...", "mafia" should be written in italics, because the etymology of the term is in question; furthermore, the use of the initial capital letter isn't even clear, since "Mafia" is written 90% (approximately) with a capital initial letter and the remaining percentage with a lowercase initial letter. JackkBrown (talk) 08:47, 4 February 2024 (UTC)

JackkBrown, the word "Mafia" has been in widespread everyday use in the English language for many decades, so there is no need to italicize it. Questions about etymology have nothing to do with capitalization. A simple Google Books search for lowercase "mafia" shows that the overwhelming majority of reliable sources use the uppercase "Mafia", and treat the word as a proper noun, even when the search term is presented in lower case. Reliable contemporary sources almost always capitalize and almost never italicize. We reflect the usage in reliable sources. These are basic, elementary facts that Wikipedia editors should be able to determine on their own. This is not a problem. Cullen328 (talk) 09:04, 4 February 2024 (UTC)