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