Steve Bennett wrote:
Not surprisingly, that rarely helps. Most topics are not strongly associated with one form of English or another. How about this scenario: The original "contributor" writes 2 paragraphs in AmE. Later, a group of British editors decides to expand the article to 40 paragraphs. According to our guidelines, they would not be justified in changing to BE.
It would really help -- pardon me for engaging in a bit of wistful thinking here -- if people wouldn't get so worked up about the whole AmE/BrE thing.
If someone gratuitously rewrote a bunch of my own purple prose into the other style, I'd just laugh, or shake my head. What's the harm? It's certainly nothing to get roiled up into a revert war over, or a big, wonky policy debate.
There seem to be lots of American editors who think that British English is *wrong*, and likewise British editors who think that American English is *wrong*. (They rarely come out and say this explicitly, but the vigor with which they debate a change from one to the other suggests that's how thy really feel, deep down.) But, of course, it's not that one or the other is Right or Wrong; they're just different.
(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.)