David Friedland wrote:
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>]
Actually this already happens - look at article histories, and you'll see dozens of editors not fixing obviously broken table or image markups, and when I fix those myself, I'll get little thank-you notes from people saying "I have no idea how those work". Fortunately they occur in support bits like images, not in the content proper. As Angela's excellent example shows, the markup can easily overwhelm the text and render it as unreadable as any HTML hack.
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.
So you're saying that there are Americans unable to follow articles written in British style, and vice versa? I've not seen that - the most common situation is where readers understand full well what is being said, but object to the way it's being said, usually for nationalist/chauvinist reasons. We should take our example from the Portuguese, who recognize that there are local dialects, but who have set themselves the goal of writing their encyclopedic material in a dialect-neutral fashion.
Stan