James R. Johnson wrote:
But the issue is (to me, at least), that I can understand you, even if you spell funny (honour, colour, etc.) and have funny words (lift, pavement instead of elevator and sidewalk). And do understand that I'm being slightly sarcastic here, please don't rant-reply. Americans have some spellings, English have some spellings, but we can understand each other, except when we use our dialect-specific words. I don't really think it appropriate to dialectualize the wikipedia unless there's mutual unintelligibility (as in the Frisian case, I think it was).
I agree this is a good principle, and it does seem to be followed for the most part. In the Chinese case, a little bit of creative machine-transliteration even made some *non* mutually intelligible scripts able to coexist on the same Wikipedia (because they happen to be close enough to a 1-to-1 mapping that 95% of the conversion can be done automatically). As far as spreading knowledge goes, consolidating effort as much as possible makes semse, IMO.
(Although it seems the Scandinavian Wikipedias are going the opposite direction, creating a separate Wikipedia for each mutually-intelligible dialect.)
-Mark