Last modified: 2014-08-29 11:46:36 UTC
There's no reason the personal toolbar link should be lowercase in monobook, especially since they are all on one text line (and thus appear to run together as a sentence) and it doesn't make sense for certain languages (where the capitalization is important for meaning). The sidebar navigation links are in regular sentence case, so these should be the same for consistency. This also avoids the problem of elements inheriting the text-transform, such as the notifications flyout (although there is a workaround in place for it currently).
The patch for this (which was abandoned in favor of this bug) is change Id8dd1454.
Quoting myself from the patch: They have always been this way. This is an integral part of the skin. The solution to not having text-transform applied to non-portlet items inserted inside the portlet is not to insert non-portlet items inside the portlet.