Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales wrote:
Ray Saintonge wrote:
I don't think that a vote would help. It will only show one group to be dominant, and may just divide that community even more. Accepting the other side's way of expressing itself is worth a lot more.
I think it's the opposite, but maybe I misunderstand you.
Puzzled???? Since our views appear to co-incide on this. - Consensus building is to be preferred over voting.
If a handful of Americans got fed up with those crazy British spellings and insane measurements that no one has ever heard of, like "kilometre" and such nonsense, and asked us to create an American English wikipedia, we would quite properly refuse, right? What we would say is "Accepting the other side's way of expressing itself is worth a lot more".
Canadian usage has always been based on a compromise between the two. On the Km issue we do tend to go with the international standard. :-)
And that's what we do on en, i.e. "try to relax" about it. There are some conventions and standards, but it really (in my opinion) boils down to that: let's just relax and respect and accept that other people use words a little bit differently.
It would be unwise, I think, for people to declare that _only_ Brazilian Portuguese is acceptable, or that _only_ European Portuguese is acceptable. The best solution, I think, is for people to try to relax about it and get along. This will usually involve avoiding local expressions as much as necessary, and trying to be understanding.
That all seems to match my own view. These things have a way of working themselves out when given the time as long as we don't take a panicked approach, or one like voting which causes positions to harden. The two scripts for Serbian and Chinese, the accepted spelling for Jesus Christ in Romanian are only recent examples of an issue that will keep repeating itself.
Ec