Wikipedia often rejects corporate case styling and uses the sane "first letter upper case, others lowercase" for some brands. For example Wikipedia writes Nvidia instead of NVIDIA, although the company always capitalizes its name without exception.

No, Wikipedia does not make the judgement call on whether to "reject" corporate case styling on its own, it follows what is "in widespread use":

> 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/Trad...

One thing that entry does not cover is all lower-case names. Although a couple things I looked up (gnuplot, xkcd), Wikipedia does seen to respect all lower-case. I'm not sure how many companies actually have all lower-case names--even if their logo is all lower-case. And my observation is that even many projects that are nominally lower-case, aren't very consistent about it as in the current example.

Relevant Manual of Style entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style/Trad...

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".

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/Trad...

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.

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).

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.

Do people actually write eBay? It looks as dated as eMail.

iPhone is definitely an example of marketing winning over grammar, but it's not a given. Plenty of style guides indicate "our company name is to be written in all caps", when they want to stand out, which the rest of us happily ignore.

>Do people actually write eBay?

Yes?

In my experience, publications and the like do tend to respect the capitalization and other choices of a company/project/etc. with perhaps some exceptions like the ! in Yahoo! and perhaps all caps as in NVIDIA. In the case of Wikipedia, I'd go so far as to say that they're simply wrong if they're ignoring the actual way a company name is officially styled.

Mind you, I'm not necessarily a big fan of case-sensitive everything but here we are.

You'll see me even write e-mail!

Names should be written as they were created, grammar regarding them only comes into question in case of suffixes or the like.

I can mostly agree with people's names, especially stuff like cultural variations or things that are basically name prepositions like de/Mac/o etc. That said if you decided to change your name to "JOHN SMITH" don't be surprised if that decision was less respected and you were referred to as "John Smith" following capitalisation norms.

Companies don't get even that assumption for me, sure I'll use "iPhone" because they've won that one and it's the cultural expectation, but the only time I'm using "FREE NOW" is to criticise that decision

Maybe. Probably. But in practice no one really cares other than editors and pedants. I'd probably only bother if I was showcasing something to people from that particular entity.