On Thu, 30 Sep 2004 14:29:59 -0700, David Friedland david@nohat.net wrote:
Is
The -{en-us colors; en-gb colours}- of the U.S. flag are red, white and blue.
going to dissuade users from editing an article any more than the following?
Here's a scenario: Sue the Surfer comes across an article that says "The colour of the U.S. flag are red, white and blue." Spotting the "Edit this page" link - and maybe having surfed enough to get the idea that it really means she can - she clicks. She looks for the text she wanted to change, and sees "The -{en-us color; en-gb colour}- of the U.S. flag are red, white and blue." Does she know what to do now? Are "en-us" and "en-gb" likely to mean anything to her? Will she know that she needs to put the s onto both spellings? Will she understand that some people see one and some the other? The answer is likely to be no, and the result may be that she "leaves it to someone more experienced".
Unlike with a lot of the existing features, this example doesn't feature anything intrinsically complex (maths formulae, formatted navigation boxes which are displayed on multiple pages, etc); it just comes in the middle of a sentence. I think that's quite a significant difference. Note that markup such as ''italics'' and '''bold''', although somewhat opaque to a new user, doesn't actually interfere with the text, it just looks like somewhat spilt some punctuation nearby. Probably the most imposing markup we have *in the middle of sentences* right now is piped links: "The colours of the [[United Kingdom|British]] flag are red, white and blue" (there are times it looks worse than that, I know, but I'm tired). Hopefully, the effect of those is clear enough that it wouldn't take someone long to just guess; language switching may not be quite so obvious, because it's very hard to see in action.
<div style="border: 1px solid black; background: #ffefcf; padding: 7px;">If you were looking for an article on the abbreviation "VFD", please see [[VFD]].</div>
{{Shortcut|[[WP:VFD]]}} {{deletiontools}} {{VfD_header}} [http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Wikipedia:Votes_for_deletion&... <small>edit</small>]
That example shows some interesting things: the <div> at the top is ugly, because it is essentially a hack to get the desired effect, something we haven't come up with wiki-syntax for. The templates neatly hide away ugly table code, and some ugly <div>s; they are hard to edit, because templates are relatively new, and we haven't come up with a decent interface for them yet - this could indeed be a fairly major point of confusion. The last line is even hackier than the first, and is just crying out for some proper wiki-markup to be invented, because it looks a lot more complex than it really is.
This suggests to me that: extra wiki-markup can be a force for good as well as evil. We need to use it sparingly, and design it carefully, so that the confusion caused doesn't outweigh the advantage of the extra feature.
Rather than trying to live in the fiction that en-us and en-gb are equally understandable and mutually compatible, we should admit that they are different, that those differences can and empirically do cause problems, and that we should create a solution to solve it.
But the question is: is the impact of the proposed solution proportional to the impact of the problem. My personal feeling is that, for barely-dialectical variants of English, the answer is no.
I also agree with Angela's point that we need to remember just how many variants of English there are out there, and consider whether artificially splitting the English-speaking world into US and UK could actually *cause* conflict over what the people see who are neither.