Angela wrote:

1. so you can use "what links here" from the date pages to find

everything that happened on that date

But the day of year and year are linked separately, making this effectively useless. I'd much prefer to link each day individually, but this task may be too monumental to do (not so much in terms of writing and using the appropriate script - but in terms of getting widespread agreement)

Pete

Rowan Collins wrote:

I think the idea is that you can research a list of anniversaries / "on this day" by investigating links in "what links here". I suppose you could have a redirect for every single date in history (that's 730,000 to cover from the New Testament to the present; oh, and that's assuming you only have one valid form for each date, of course...), but for one thing you'd max out the what links here display for the targets (assuming [[4 November 1982]] would redirect to [[4 November]]) without showing a single real page.

And what would you gain exactly? You'd still have to refine the list into a manually edited page to make it in any way interesting or useful, and the result would be... well, remarkably similar to what we have now, I imagine.

For recent times, I would not redirect at all. We have enough material (from current events) to do a single article on each day for the last three years.

For moderately recent times such as November 4 1982, (or, in my case, 19 October 1978?) there is easily enough material available to write a single article if you there was motivation for people to do it.

Going back further there are several options, but it might be better for both [[July 1776]] and [[4 July]] to transclude [[4 July 1776 (data)]] (possibly transcluding an empty page) and for [[4 July 1776]] to redirect to one or other of them.

Pete

On Wed, 29 Sep 2004 06:27:26 -0300, e2m e2m@ig.com.br wrote:

Por que este recurso não é usado para tratar com as diferenças do tipo "behaviour" e "behavior" ou "center" and "centre"?

Why this resource is not used to deal with the differences of the type "behaviour" and "behavior" or "center" and "centre"?

Because: a) it would require linking every instance of those words (if we were to use *exactly* the same mechanism); which would be ugly. b) nobody seems to mind that much, and the general consensus is just to leave the variant spellings in place, or pick one version or the other for a specific article (UK spelling on UK articles, etc) c) nobody thought of applying this particular bit of the software to that before and/or nobody thought of this bit of the software as a particularly generic tool before

However: If you look at some of the discussion, here and on wikitech-l, about the zh-tw / zh-cn issue, you will see that there is a forthcoming software feature which includes syntax for entering two variants of a word into an article (" {-zh-tw some word zh-cn other word-} " IIRC). Suggestions to apply this to other languages (e.g. en-us / en-gb) have been made, but people still aren't convinced this particular one needs a technical solution.

Angela wrote:

One reason is that the differences between American and British English are more involved than simply changing the spelling of a few words. Punctuation and grammar are also involved. If you changed behavior to behaviour in an otherwise AE sentence, the sentence would then be wrong in both languages.

I can't seem to find the page now, but I seem to remember a policy page where we've basically settled on a compromise, partially-invented "international English" punctuation style for clarity and because it's not really worth fighting over. The compromise included the British-style "put punctuation _after_ closing quotation marks", and something from US style that I can't remember. As for being "wrong", that's only the case if you happen to be a [[en:prescription and description|grammatical prescriptivist]], which not all of us are.

But as far as the spelling issue goes, it seems like a solution in search of a problem. The current approach seems to be working well enough.

-Mark

Wiki is supposed to be easy to edit. Having markup like the following is going to be very off-putting to most users, and not only to newcomers.

{-en-us " en-gb '-}IBM {-en-us has en-gb have-} announced that {-en-us ' en-gb "-}{-en-us eggplant en-gb aubergine-} should be {-en-us spelled en-gb spelt-} with one g like {-en-us garbage en-gb rubbish-}, {-en-us analog en-gb analogue-}{-en-us , en-gb -} and {-en-us gray en-gb grey-}{-en-us '. en-gb ."-}{-en-us " en-gb '-}

If the process was automated, problems would occur since you don't want the sentence appearing as IBM having commented on the spelling of aubergine when they haven't done so. An automated translation would also suggest the word "rubbish" was spelt with a "g". Many similar examples exist, such as "forward" which is sometimes "forwards" in British English, but not always, so this really can't be automated.

Bring in other forms of English and the problem gets even more complicated. Should we really have {-en-au Zucchini en-nz Courgette en-us Zucchini en-gb Courgette en-ca Zucchini-}?

{-en-gb Angela}

David Friedland wrote:

Delirium wrote:

...

Angela wrote:

...

One reason is that the differences between American and British English are more involved than simply changing the spelling of a few words. Punctuation and grammar are also involved. If you changed behavior to behaviour in an otherwise AE sentence, the sentence would then be wrong in both languages.

I can't seem to find the page now, but I seem to remember a policy page where we've basically settled on a compromise, partially-invented "international English" punctuation style for clarity and because it's not really worth fighting over. The compromise included the British-style "put punctuation _after_ closing quotation marks", and something from US style that I can't remember. As for being "wrong", that's only the case if you happen to be a [[en:prescription and description|grammatical prescriptivist]], which not all of us are.

But as far as the spelling issue goes, it seems like a solution in search of a problem. The current approach seems to be working well enough.

I heartily disagree. The current approach is a constant source of disagreement and worsening of linguistic tensions. I am always running into minor tiffs over British vs American spelling that could be eliminated with multi-dialect support. This would also mean that when I run into a Britishism on an article that might be confusing or misleading to an American reader, instead of changing it to an Americanism and drawing the ire of the original author (or changing it to something neutral and probably drawing the ire of the original author), the original author's Britishism can stay, the Americanism will be viewable to Americans, and everyone is a little bit happier.

I think that the minor increase in complexity for editing is far outweighed by the increase in understandability, familiarity, and dialectical consistency. As for syntactic differences between the dialects, I have yet to see anything that differed by more than a handful of words. Most of the major differences are in informal, colloquial speech.

I agree with Mark and Angela on this. Your position is premised on their being only two strictly demarcated forms of English. Canadian English is a hybrid that lies between the two, and often depends on the preferences of the individual who happens to be writing. Australians and South Africans may generally tend toward Commonwealth English, but they too can have their esceptions. Indian English must have a lakh of interesting variations, and we haven't yet considered African and Caribbean variants. I can't possibly imagine a hardware fix that would adequately deal with all these rich varieties.

Ec

On 1 Oct 2004, at 11:57, Ray Saintonge wrote:

Indian English must have a lakh of interesting variations

Indian English... A LAKH OF...

;-D ;-) :-P

To the above observation of INDIAN English I add the following:

BRITISH: My dear old chap, British English probably has an indeed substantial amount of interesting variations. IRISH: For f*cks sake, Irish English must have a bunch of interesting variations -- and all that Mullarkey. AMERICAN: Yeah man, American English has, like, a gazillion of interesting variations, oh boy. AUSTRALIAN: Crikey! Australian English has a rweal loarge amount of interesting variations!

-- ropers [[en:User:Ropers]] www.ropersonline.com

Jens Ropers wrote:

On 1 Oct 2004, at 11:57, Ray Saintonge wrote:

...

Indian English must have a lakh of interesting variations

Indian English... A LAKH OF...

;-D ;-) :-P

To the above observation of INDIAN English I add the following:

BRITISH: My dear old chap, British English probably has an indeed substantial amount of interesting variations. IRISH: For f*cks sake, Irish English must have a bunch of interesting variations -- and all that Mullarkey.

No, no, no.

"For feck sake, Irish English is all over the shop -- and all that shite."

Angela wrote:

One reason is that the differences between American and British English are more involved than simply changing the spelling of a few words. Punctuation and grammar are also involved. If you changed behavior to behaviour in an otherwise AE sentence, the sentence would then be wrong in both languages. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_and_British_English_differences

I just wanted to second this, and add one more thing.

Differences between American and British English are too involved for computers, but _quite easy_ for humans. Therefore, people should just relax about it. It adds a lot of richness to wikipedia, I think.

--Jimbo