On Dec 25, 2004, at 11:01 AM, John Lee wrote:
Stirling Newberry wrote:
It's a trade off between reader confusiong,
from dialectical
inconsistencies, and editor confusion. Of these two, the latter is
easier to solve, because educating editors is within the reach of
Wikimedia, where as changing readers is not. This syntax is no more
difficult than the use of macros, image links and considerably less
complex than tables.
The problem is that in English it will be greatly confusing and
irritatingly convoluted. Even simple words will have to be written
using the syntax (i.e. centre or center? Billion or millard? Flavour
or flavor?). Imagine editing an article with this sort of thing. I
don't think the trade-off is worth it, at least for different English
"dialects".
Less work than editting mathematical equations or tables by far. And
less work that reorganizing and moving pages.
As for othographic dialect changes this is not an objection: there is
already a tradition:simplified substitution that does a similar level
of translation. The process would be to have a "reverse bot" which
would find where users have made orthological dialect differences,
substitute them for the base dialect word, and then put them in machine
translation.
It's not conceptually difficult, whether it is what people want to do
is another, but it is certain "worth it" for readability and
consistency.