Jens Ropers wrote:
My 2 [[eurocent]]s:
The possibilities for diverse British/American spelling being so
widespread, the adoption of "both options"-markup would absolutely
_guarantee_ that every single article's markup would become so
convoluted that it will more successfully prevent new contributors from
joining the Wikipedia than all other "less than optimal" proposals
combined.
The differences between British/US English DO NOT impair understanding
of the article text for most people.
Extra markup to "cater for" these differences DECIDEDLY WOULD impair
understanding of the markup text for most people.
IMHO the motion to introduce the proposed markup epitomizes the victory
of grammarian stormtrooping over the KISS principle.
Every suggestion to add a feature to wiki markup gets immediately
denounced by certain people who insist that adding any new feature will
make the wiki markup too complicated and drive away new users.
And yet, no one has ever shown that that new users have been put off
complex wiki markup. In fact, the number of editors grows every day, and
continues to grow, regardless of the complexity of wiki markup. This
kind of reactionary opposition to the addition of features to wiki
markup is unwarranted. We already have wiki markup for mathematical
formulas and even Egyptial hieroglyphics. Why is support for dialect
variants such an onerous addition? Do want to not implement a feature
that actual people want and desire and will use because there may be
hypothetical people who might not join the project because we have the
feature?
It seems to me that the syntax for templates, image thumbnails, tables,
and mathematic formulas have already made the wikitext hard to read and
understand for new users. The reality is that in the creation of an
encyclopedia, there are complicated things and ideas that require
complicated markup. Is localized dialectical consistency not something
worth striving for? And who should make that decision?
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?
<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>]
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.
- David Friedland