On 6/10/06, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
On 6/10/06, Delirium delirium@hackish.org wrote:
I don't see it as making it impossible to change, but rather saying that violating "whatever makes sense for the topic" is the only good reason to change from one to the other.
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.
As I see it, the change just has to be justfied by some tangible benefit. Here, the benefit is clear - great expansion of the article.
Good writers should also be able to write in a style contrary to their own: in this case, writing AE when BE is their preference.