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".
Though I still do not support the idea in English, if the Chinese language wikipedians want it it should be their choice.
Ec