The 40,000-Word War Over a Lowercase i

In 2012, Paramount announced a Star Trek sequel with a cunningly formatted title: Star Trek Into Darkness. No colon. No subtitle. Four words — and one grammatical landmine.

The minor edit

Wikipedia's style manual lowercases short prepositions in titles. So: is "into darkness" a subtitle (capital I) or is the whole thing one continuous phrase about trekking into darkness (lowercase i)? An editor lowercased the i. Another editor raised it. Then it went back down. Then up.

− Star Trek into Darkness

• Star Trek Into Darkness

edit summary: "per MOS:CT — see talk"

The major consequence

The talk page discussion ballooned to roughly 40,000 words — longer than many novellas — dissecting whether a preposition can be load-bearing. There were tables of precedents. There were appeals to the poster art, the press kit, and the metaphysics of colons. Tech media picked it up and gleefully reported that Wikipedia was at war over a single letter.

The fight only ended when reliable sources overwhelmingly standardized on the capital I, and the article settled at Star Trek Into Darkness. The debate earned a permanent exhibit in Wikipedia's own museum of lamest edit wars — and became the canonical case study of how a two-byte change can consume a community for months.