There are many instances where names and acronyms are not spelled right, or where dashes are missing or even introduced. Should we correct them?
Examples:
Should we correct these kind of errors or are they too small to address?
Yes, we should make sure that names, function names and acronyms are correctly spelled and applied.
We are used as a reference by students of cryptography. Not all students will be aware of how the terms should be written, and will likely copy the spelling as (mis-)applied on the site. Therefore making sure that the spelling is correct is an important job and warrants an edit. This is doubly true if the misspelling is in the title of the question.
Besides that, correct spelling of these kind of terms are vitally important for having our site look as professional as possible. Professional looking questions and answers are more likely to be taken seriously.
So please make sure that Elgamal*1, Vigenère, AES-128, SHA-256 and SHA3-256 are used correctly.
If there are any doubts on how to spell these names then please lookup the standard in which they are found. When it comes to names, please use the way how an author spells their name themselves in English-oriented material. Otherwise please use the most accepted spelling. A correct spelling can often be quickly found on Wikipedia, we can always adjust when the Wikipedia spelling is clearly incorrect.
Some leniency can be applied if the incorrect term is in common use and doesn't cause any confusion. E.g. 3DES, Triple DES are probably better terms than (T)DEA, the official name for the Data Encryption Algorithm that nobody seems to use anymore.
However, edits that add a single dash on a single misuse - when the term is used multiple times - will still be considered a minor change and may be rejected for that reason. If you're adamant that it is still required, then you'll have to include a good reason in the comments for the system to let such a change through.
*1 Elgamal is how the LinkedIn page and Wikipedia page both capitalize the name. ElGamal should also be allowed due to historical significance but Elgamal should be preferred.
We don't need any new rules: the help center already endorses fixing spelling mistakes.
Any such changes should be individually justified and should not counteract the author's reasonable style choices. The examples listed do not make a good set of rules for slavish adherence.
The cryptographer (and now CTO of Salesforce) spells his name Taher Elgamal in English. The original Arabic is طاهر الجمل, which does not have case distinctions. One could reasonably read الجمل with a definite article and transliterate it as ‘al-Jamal’ just as well as one could reasonably transliterate it with the anglophone typographical conventions for names as ‘Elgamal’. ‘ElGamal’ also appears in print, in publications before he decided that the intermediate uppercase letter was too much trouble to deal with.
While ‘al-Jamal’ may not be recognizable in cryptography, ‘Elgamal’ and ‘ElGamal’ are both justifiable and we should not edit one to the other.
Blaise de Vigenère, the diplomat and cryptographer of the XVIe century to whom the Vigenère cipher is misattributed, had his name typeset in publications as Blaiſe de Vigenere (example; note the use of accents elsewhere in the same publication, suggesting a conscious decision).
While there is nothing wrong with writing Vigenère to reflect the orthography for modern Parisian pronunciation, I see no reason impose upon ourselves a rule to bow before the authoritarian prescriptions of l'Académie française; the Vigenère cipher is just as recognizable as the Vigenere cipher.
Aes-128 is an abomination.
The dash is appropriate in some contexts and inappropriate in others. In isolation it is a little clearer on the eyes to talk about SHA-256 and SHA3-256 than than to talk about SHA256 and SHA3256; but while SHA3-256 is nicer than SHA-3-256, SHA-3 is nicer than SHA3; and it is clearer to say HMAC-SHA256 than to say HMAC-SHA-256—yet with the possible exception of SHA3256 (which sometimes appears in programming interfaces and is not much more wrong than Poly1305 to refer to $2^{130} - 5$ or Curve25519 to refer to $2^{255} - 19$) none of these is wrong.
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of professional minds.
