From my point
of view as a native English speaker who lives in England (not
in the American sense
of "UK"!)
I think it's important that when I type in words like:
"colour"
That I get "colour" and not "color". I don't see why I need to
know the
spelling of the word in what to me is a foreign language when I'm looking up
a word in a dictionary of my language.
---
To GerardM
Basically there are two orthographies for English.
Some might argue the toss about that, I mean for myself as a "Scots"
speaker, I know there are some who make a big deal about it being a separate
language, but I myself don't know how to spell it properly, and I just think
of it as a regional dialect of English like Scouse, Yorkshire, Texan, Kiwi
and whatever else - because I would read normal English and pronounce it the
same way as Scots - the odd word like "leid" to me is no different than a
Yorkshireman saying "summat" for "something" or someone from the
southeast
USA saying "y'all" - they're just dialect words.
I can show you texts written in a Yorkshire orthography, but the practical
fact is that the overwhelming majority of the text in the modern world is
either spelt the English way, or the American way.
The debate is "huge" in terms of it's implications, because up until now
no-one appears to have challenged the idea that American-English has the
right to be considered the standard form of English. It's patently obvious
it's a dialect, with it's own orthography and it's simply wrong for the
headword in English to be written in a dialect of English in a dialectal
orthography and presented as the standard form, when it's not.
Hoi,
I would not consider either variation of English to be more or less
important/relevant. What I consider is practical; how does it impact
including this content in Ultimate Wiktionary.. Here we have a need to
identify a word as either EE or AE or ?E and the question is how to do this.
It is up to the Wiktionary comunity how they want to have this. They can
either have it with descriptions in definitions and etymologies spelled
in one of the used orthographies or it can be considered not to be too
important and it can be either.
Thanks,
GerardM