On Mon, 27 Sep 2004 00:58:18 -0400, Evan Prodromou <evan(a)bad.dynu.ca> wrote: ... ... Actually, I thought linking dates *was* encouraged - for the (admittedly rather opaque) reason that this triggered special code to reformat them: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Editing says "Use links for dates, so everyone can set their own display order. Use Special:Preferences to change your own date display setting." Basically, putting links round "[[January 27]], [[2003]]" makes it appear as though it was "[[27 January]] [[2003]]" or even "[[2003]] [[01-27]]" depending how the viewer's preferences are set. Nifty, but perhaps a bit too magic... -- Rowan Collins BSc [IMSoP]

In message <1096261098.9992.59.camel@bad>, Evan Prodromou &lt;evan-zOntnoXveK8sA/PxXw9srA(a)public.gmane.org&gt; writes On the contrary -- linking dates is strongly encouraged, so that they are displayed according to the readers' preferences. [[27 September]] [[2004]] will display variously as 27 September 2004, September 27, 2004, or 2004-09-27. It saves a great many edit wars that way. Anything which will pour oil on the troubled waters of Transatlantic writing styles is a good thing. -- Arwel Parry http://www.cartref.demon.co.uk/

On Tue, 28 Sep 2004 08:05:46 +0100, Pete/Pcb21 &lt;pete_pcb21_wpmail(a)pcbartlett.com&gt; 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. -- Rowan Collins BSc [IMSoP]

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"? e2m Em Mon, 27 Sep 2004 20:46:37 +0100, Angela &lt;beesley(a)gmail.com&gt; escreveu:

e2m &lt;e2m(a)ig.com.br&gt; 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 Angela.

Delirium wrote: 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. IBM {-en-us has en-gb have-} introduced several new products... In sum, if the code is already being written to support a major case (Chinese), it strikes me as perverse to not allow for minor cases like English. If people want to do it, why not let them? - David

David Friedland wrote: 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

Angela wrote: In some parts of the US it is "trash" :-) Ec

PS: To all non-native speakers: The joke here is that the term "lakh" originated in India. Hah, the joys of etymology! Hey, waitaminute! I'm a non-native speaker, actually! 96% verbal SAT percentile, but '''I ASSURE YOU''' I am a non-native speaker. Hm. Whatever. Go figure. </braggadocio> On 1 Oct 2004, at 16:18, Jens Ropers wrote:

On 1 Oct 2004, at 16:30, Jimmy O'Regan wrote: Jimmy, you wouldn't possibly be a Dublin lad, would you? Or knew a few Wikipedians from "the capital"? Because "the nation needs your help". Please visit and read the note headed "ATTENTION". Then please help getting as many Dublin-based Wikipedians as possible to head over to and sign up as potential Dublin helpers. Thanks a million! -- ropers [[en:User:Ropers]] www.ropersonline.com