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