Wildrick Steele wrote:
On 14/06/06, Delirium delirium@hackish.org wrote:
Ray Saintonge wrote:
Steve Summit wrote:
(The problem's just as bad over on Wiktionary, where there are stubbornly, defiantly distinct pages for `color' and `colour'. Huge, repetitive, internecine arguments regularly erupt, whenever anyone has the temerity to suggest that the two entries be merged somehow since they're "obviously" just two spelling variants for "the same" word.)
It's not a problem. The reasonable people understand that it needs to be on two separate pages.
Standard practice of dictionaries, though, is to collapse trivial variants into one entry. Even the OED, quite possibly the most thorough English-language encyclopedia in existence, does this. What's the point of duplicating information?
It's simply not NPOV to list only one, or to list both under one title. The OED, apart from being authoritative, is still British, while Wiktionary is for all variants of English.
That sounds like an argument for making "hard" links where both titles are equally authoritative---i.e. "traveling" and "travelling" are both top-level titles, but in fact are the same page.
The current solution, making them different pages, is IMO much worse than favoring one or the other, since it requires people to basically copy/paste definitions across multiple pages, and make sure changes stay in sync. Look, for example, at "traveling" versus "travelling", which currently actually have wildly different content despite being the same word with a minor variation in spelling (this was the first example I checked).
-Mark