David Friedland wrote:
I recognize that spoken British English and spoken
American English
are very different in many subtle and usually ainconsequential ways,
as you say, but _written_ British English and American English,
which are much more standardized, tend to differ in certain specific
ways...
Although I still disagree with the conclusion, I did want to
acknowledge that this is certainly true.
Where a word has different spellings/usages, the
spelling/usage that has
the most number of Google hits shall be the spelling/usage used on
Wikipedia. If the spelling/usage with the most number of Google hits
changes, then so shall the spellings/usages on Wikipedia.
At least this way we can be sure that the spellings/usages we use will
be ones used by a majority that is based on actual data. It's
incontrovertible, democratic, neutral, and completely dialect-agnostic.
Not to mention consistent.
This does have some merit, and of course "number of Google hits" is a
traditional method of settling other disputes. But the problem as I
see it is that American English is much more common on the Internet
than other variants, so the rule would in practice amount to "always
use American English" -- and this strikes me as deeply undesirable.
I suppose the biggest area where we differ is in our estimation of the
magnitude of the problem. I view the differences as relatively minor,
and as far as I have been able to determine, the number of edit wars
and acrimonious arguments about this has been quite small overall.
Are people really getting upset about this?
--Jimbo