Robert Graham Merkel wrote:
While I admire the pluck of characterizing inconsistency as richness, I think that "down in the trenches" the reality of the differences in dialect (mostly between en-us and en-gb, but also, for example between pt-pt and pt-br) is a continuous stream of conflict, debate, confusion, and frustration that policy has failed to allieviate.
And you think that there wouldn't be massive bunfights as to which word was most appropriate for each of the dozens of English locales - given that many people within a locale will use different words for the same object or concept?
No solution is perfect, but I think the debates among e.g. Brits and Americans about usage will be substantially less frequent and acrimonious, as written American English and written British English have something of a standard that is upheld by usage guides and the like. (I make no argument here about the legitamacy of such usage guides, merely an argument about their significance, which is unequivocal.)
There exists a technical solution that would alleviate the problem and not significantly burden editors. Should we reject this solution on the wishful notion that our differences can unite rather than divide us?
No, only a tiny fraction of the many subtle and usually inconsequential differences between British and American English (not to mention the many other variations of English, some that don't fit neatly on national boundaries) are amenable to technical solutions.
And so, because we can only fix some of the differences, we should therefore fix none at all? I recognize that spoken British English and spoken American English are very different in many subtle and usually inconsequential ways, as you say, but _written_ British English and American English, which are much more standardized, tend to differ in certain specific ways which mostly are amenable to a technical solution to translating between them. The vast majority of dialectical differences are in the everyday, informal, spoken register that is not the style that Wikipedia is written in. In fact it is the relatively formal style of Wikipedia articles that makes me support a method to make dialectical differences consistent. The occasional dialectical spelling or words that differs from that encountered on other pages comes across as frankly sloppy and contrasts negatively IMHO with the otherwise consistently formal yet accessible style of the articles. There is a vision to make all the articles consistent in terms of being factualn, well-written, and well-researched, but there is no such vision for making the articles dialectically consistent. The policy that articles should be individually consistent based on either their subject or the dialect used by the original author (!) doesn't really seem to fit in with the goal of making Wikipedia a world-class reference work. Instead it seems to just make it inconsistent, unprofessional, and dialectically fragmented.
Is any technological measure going to make the following (fictional) passage accessible to the average American?
Brian Lara scored a double ton at the WACA in the 1997-98 season in a tour match against the PM's 11. This was a Bradmanesque effort, the feat even more impressive considering Jo Angel's reverse swing and Michael Bevan's Chinamen, both aided by the Fremantle Doctor.
This example is a red herring. I could make the same argument about the following nonfictional example, from [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-theory], which is equally inaccessible to the average English speaker, British, American, or otherwise.
Open strings of the type I theory can have endpoints which satisfy the Neumann boundary condition. Under this condition, the endpoints of strings are free to move about but no momentum can flow into or out of the end of a string. The T duality infers the existence of open strings with positions fixed in the dimensions that are T-transformed. Generally, in type II theories, we can imagine open strings with specific positions for the end-points in some of the dimensions. This lends an inference that they must end on a preferred surface. Superficially, this notion seems to break the relativistic invariance of the theory, possibly leading to a paradox. The resolution of this paradox is that strings end on a p-dimensional dynamic object, the Dp-brane.
Admittedly, many of the terms used here are defined earlier in the article, but my point is that this debate is about dialectical differences, not jargon. Argot and dialect are not the same thing.
On the *specific* issue of number names, it might be feasible to provide a fix there. Beyond that, however, technical fixes are more trouble than they're worth.
If we provide _any_ dialect-specific code, who decides what gets fixed and what doesn't? Certainly you don't believe that the billion/milliard example is the only such difference that warrants a fix? What trouble do you envision other than "massive bunfights" among writers of a particular dialect about usage? What harm is there in letting people put brackets around {{colour}} so it appears with the correct spelling for American readers? For the vast majority of cases, my proposal would bring non-intrusive and more accessible dialectical consistency to Wikipedia. Certainly a solution the frequent and acrimonous debates about British versus American usage is at least worth a try.
In fact, the use of brackets in the wikitext to indicate regionalisms I think would be a far better tool for learning about the dialectical differences than encountering the occasional unfamiliar word or spelling that one might _guess_ is dialectical.
Finally, since no one seems interested in bringing dialectical consistency to Wikipedia in this area, might I propose an alternate policy for usage disputes?
Where a word has different spellings/usages, the spelling/usage that has the most number of Google hits shall be the spelling/usage used on Wikipedia. If the spelling/usage with the most number of Google hits changes, then so shall the spellings/usages on Wikipedia.
At least this way we can be sure that the spellings/usages we use will be ones used by a majority that is based on actual data. It's incontrovertible, democratic, neutral, and completely dialect-agnostic. Not to mention consistent.
- David