[Wikipedia-l] English orthographies

[Gerard Meijssen]

Hoi,
To explain to the people on the Wiktionary mailinglist where this comes 
from, there is a huge debate on the Wikipedia-l mailinglist about having 
a seperate English and American English wikipedia.

In the plans for Ultimate Wiktionary there are three ways in which words 
can be destinguished as being of a particular orthography. I will 
describe these here and hope to use the energy of this discussion for 
this question that needs a resolution at some stage.

1) English, American English and other orthographies are treated as 
seperate entities. This means that all words need to exist for each 
orthography/dialect. On the plus side it means that descriptions like 
etymology and meaning will be in this one orthography as well. This is 
also the most easy method to provide information for a spell checker.

2) We treat these variants as belonging to a specific "spelling 
authority". This means that one word needs to be only once in the 
database. It means that the meanings and etymologies etc can be in any 
of the orthographies.. It means that you cannot record the relations 
between the words of these different orthographies/dialects. When words 
are properly identified, it means that we can use the information for a 
spell checker. It does not clearly help you understand what Meanings 
exist in a particular varietion of English. This is in my opinion the 
weakest option as it does not allow you to identify which meaning is 
true for a particular version of English.

3) We can label Meanings as belonging to one of these particular 
orthographies. When words are properly identified, it means that we can 
use the information for a spell checker.

In my opinion the number 1 option is technically the best solution. 
Going for this option is propably less problematic then breaking the 
en.wikipedia.org into pieces. Going for this option seems like a lot of 
duplication. It does however provide us with the possibility to be more 
precise in what makes English different from American, Australian etc.

Please let me know what you think and particularly why.

Thanks,
    GerardM