{{Smallcaps}} will display the lowercase part of your text as a soft format of typographical small caps. For example: {{smallcaps|Beware of Dog}} → Beware of Dog.
This template should be avoided or used sparingly, as the Manual of Style advises that small caps should be avoided and reduced to one of the other title cases or normal case and markup should be kept simple.
Usage
Your source text is not altered in the output, only the way it is displayed on the screen: a copy-paste of the text will give the small caps sections in their original form; similarly, an older or non-CSS browser will only display the original text on screen.
Code
{{Smallcaps|Your Text in 4004 bc}}
Displayed
Your Text in 4004 BC
Pasted
Your Text in 4004 BC
This template is therefore intended for the use of caps as a typographic style, such as rendering family names in bibliographies in small caps to distinguish them from given names. It should not be used for acronyms or abbreviations which are supposed to be capitalized regardless of style. For such cases, use {{Smallcaps all}}.
Notes
اعرابگذاریs (å, ç, é, ğ, ı, ñ, ø, ş, ü, etc.) are handled. However, because the job is performed by each reader's browser, inconsistencies in برگههای سبک آبشاری implementations can lead to some browsers not converting certain rare diacritics.
Use of this template does not generate any automatic categorization. As with most templates, if the argument contains an = sign, the sign should be replaced with {{=}}, or the whole argument be prefixed with 1=. And for wikilinks, you need to use piping. There is a parsing problem with MediaWiki which causes unexpected behavior when a template with one style is used within a template with another style.
There is a problem with I نقطهدار و بینقطه. {{Lang|tr|{{Smallcaps|ı i}}}} gives you ı i, although the language is set to Turkish.
Do not use this inside citation templates citation templates, or this template's markup will be included in the COinS metadata. This means that reference management software such as زوترو will store the markup. For example, if {{smallcaps}} is used to format the surname of Bloggs, Joe in {{cite journal}}, then Zotero will store the name as <span style="font-variant:small-caps;">Bloggs</span>, Joe. This is correct and incorrect COinS metadata.
To disambiguate Eastern surnames and given names at a glance
Most نام چینیs and نام کرهایs retain their surname-first order:
مائو تسهتونگ fought چیانگ کایشک
The movie Oldboy by Park Chan-wook starring Choi Min-sik was not seen by کیم ایل-سونگ
Especially in Hong Kong and Macao, a Western given name may be added as well:
Leslie Cheung Kwok-Wing
Most نام ژاپنیs are reversed in the West, but not all:
(آکیرا کوروساوا or Motojirō Kajii are usually westernized)
But ماتسوئو باشو, Ono no Komachi, Kaga no Chiyo (haiku poets known under their given name)
But Edogawa Ranpo (kept due to wordplay "EdgarA–llanPoe) vs. Ranpo Edogawa (some modern uses)
میانمار names ignore the concept of forename/surname, but are adapted in the West:
Daw آنگ سان سو چی, daughter of General Aung San ("Daw" is honorific, her name takes part of his name)
And some میانمار names are so short they need to retain an honorific prefix (U for Mister, Daw for Madam, Thakin for Master) which is confusable with a forename or a surname:
U Nu ("Mister Nu"), a.k.a. Thakin Nu ("Master Nu")
To cite یونیکد character names correctly without unwanted emphasizing
Such names are required to be written in capitals by the Unicode standard. In running text, “U+022A latin capital letter o with diaeresis and macron” is a less predominant alternative to “U+022A LATIN CAPITAL LETTER O WITH DIAERESIS AND MACRON”.
Technical
Technically, the template merely wraps the standard:
(The "font-variant:small-caps;text-transform:lowercase" has not been used because it does not work at least in Internet Explorer 5 and 6, which are still fairly common browsers.)
Suppressing small caps
If you wish to suppress the display of small caps in your browser, as a logged in user, you can make an edit to your common.css reading
span.smallcaps { font-variant: normal !important; }
See also
Templates that change the display (copy-paste will get the original text):