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Wikipedia avoids unnecessary capitalization.In English, capitalization is primarily needed for proper names, acronyms, and for the first letter of a sentence. [a] Wikipedia relies on sources to determine what is conventionally capitalized; only words and phrases that are consistently capitalized in a substantial majority of independent, reliable sources are capitalized in Wikipedia.
On the contrary, United States does not include the article "The", because sentences such as "California is part of the United States" are written with a lowercase "the". These conditions are sometimes met if the Wikipedia article name is: the title of a work or publication (e.g., The Old Man and the Sea, or The New York Times), or
The California Style Manual was first published in 1942 by Bernard E. Witkin, who was the California Reporter of Decisions from 1940 to 1949. Originally intended primarily for court staff and the Reporter of Decisions themselves, the Manual soon became popular amongst attorneys. The second edition was written by William Nankervis in 1961, who ...
[e] They are additionally capitalized where they contain proper names: Przewalski's horse, California condor, and fair-maid-of-France. This applies to species and subspecies, as in the previous examples, as well as to general names for groups or types of organism: bird of prey , oak , great apes , Bryde's whales , livestock guardian dog ...
An indefinite or definite article is capitalized only when at the start of a title, subtitle, or embedded title or subtitle. For example, a book chapter titled "An Examination of The Americans: The Anachronisms in FX's Period Spy Drama" contains three capitalized leading articles (main title "An", embedded title "The", and subtitle "The").
In summary, shortened forms of names for institutions are not capitalized unless they are "a shorter but still specific form", not just a single generic word. The material at MOS:INSTITUTIONS probably could be clarified on the question, as this isn't the first time the matter has come up.
Capitalize only those prepositions that are five letters long or longer, are the first or last word of the title, are part of a phrasal verb (e.g., "Walk On" or "Give Up the Ghost"), or are the first word in a compound preposition (e.g., "Time Out of Mind", "Get Off of My Cloud").
Generally acronyms and initialisms are capitalized, e.g., "NASA" or "SOS". Sometimes, a minor word such as a preposition is not capitalized within the acronym, such as "WoW" for "World of Warcraft". In some British English style guides, only the initial letter of an acronym is capitalized if the acronym is read as a word, e.g., "Nasa" or ...