Talk:Yu Lin

Capitalization of "alumni professor"

@David Eppstein: Claim: '"Alumni Professor" is a title of distinction, a proper noun phrase. It is not a descriptive phrase; it would not be meaningful at any other institution.' But it is used also at Carnegie-Mellon, LSU, University of Virginia, University of Rochester, Denison University, Washington and Lee, and more. If the title is part of the name and is not modified, it can be capitalized, as in "Alumni Professor Yu Lin was nominated to the American Physical Society." But this should get the same treatment as other titles of distinction, such as "university distinguished professor", or "Kennedy became president in 1961". I just noticed "In 2013 She was named as an Alumni Professor.", where the title is preceded by an indefinite article, so it should clearly be in lower case (to say nothing about "She"). You will likely see lots of capitalization of jobs in Auburn communications, but that does not mean that WP must follow that style; we have our own MoS. More explanation at WP:SSF. Also, MOS:JOBTITLE says "The formality (officialness), specificity, or unusualness of a title is not a reason to capitalize it." Please use lower case, in conformity with WP's MoS. Chris the speller ^yack 04:13, 20 December 2025 (UTC)

Your example of "president" is different; president is a job title. Professorial titles like Alumni Professor are capitalized. "Distinguished Professor" is also capitalized: it is a title of distinction, meaning that its holder has been honored by giving them that title; in contrast the English phrase "distinguished professor" merely means a professor who is distinguished in some way (like maybe getting older and letting their hair go grey). In the same way "alumni professor" is ungrammatical (it could only grammatically be alumnus professor or alumna professor) and would mean maybe a professor who is an alumnus or alumna. Please stop using lower case for titles of distinction. Doing so makes Wikipedia look ignorant.

As for the indefinite article in Alumni Professor, it merely means that the university allows itself to have more than one person with that title. It does not in any way contradict the fact that it is a title of distinction. Harvard has multiple people with the title of Benjamin Pierce Fellow (I think, unlike Alumni Professor, this is a title for a postdoc that does not pass WP:PROF). You can say that someone was a Benjamin Pierce Fellow at Harvard. You would not say the Benjamin Pierce Fellow, because there is more than one of them. And one would not say benjamin pierce fellow for reasons that should be obvious. —David Eppstein (talk) 06:17, 20 December 2025 (UTC)

Incidentally, there appear to be many incidences of the phrase "title of distinction" in Wikipedia that are incorrectly capitalized as "Title of Distinction". "Title of distinction" is just an English phrase, not itself a title of distinction, and should be lowercase. Maybe if you feel the urge to lowercase things your efforts would be more constructively applied to lowercasing these. —David Eppstein (talk) 06:35, 20 December 2025 (UTC)

Anyway, "Alumni Professor" appears to be something like an endowed chair funded by gifts from alumni (just as endowed chairs with names like Chris the Speller Professor would be funded by a gift from the person named in the name of the professorship, or from someone else wishing to honor that person). We don't lowercase names of endowed chairs. —David Eppstein (talk) 09:09, 20 December 2025 (UTC)

I don't lowercase named endowed chairs, but going back and researching to see who funds a job does not help in determining whether to capitalize a job name. It get caps if it is a proper name of a person or organization, but "alumni" looks descriptive to me. Just juxtaposing two common nouns does not make a proper noun, and a good editor who thought it did would have, in this special case, wrapped the "proper name" template around it. I don't know where your "title of distinction" argument comes from, as it is not mentioned in the MoS. The MoS does mention "executive director" and "prime minister as being in lower case, and those appear to be distinctions from "director" or "minister". I will continue to remove excessive capitalization per MoS, so that WP looks like a professional encyclopedia, not a brochure. Chris the speller ^yack 15:08, 20 December 2025 (UTC)