On Wed, Sep 9, 2009 at 6:50 PM, Tim Starling tstarling@wikimedia.org wrote:
I don't know why you're writing this nonsense, you obviously haven't looked at the code at all.
This paragraph is unnecessary.
The language variant system that we have could easily convert between US and UK English. In fact it already does convert between a language pair with a far more complex relationship, that is Simplified and Traditional Chinese.
The language conversion system is very simple, it's just a table of translated pairs, where the longest match takes precedence. The translation table in one direction (e.g. UK -> US) can be different to the table in the other direction (US -> UK). You would not list "ize -> ise", you would list every word in the dictionary with an -ize ending that can be translated to -ise without controversy. The current software could handle 50k pairs or so without serious performance problems, and it could be extended and optimised to allow millions of pairs if there was a need for that.
It's possible to handle any pair of languages which are separated only by vocabulary, and transliteration or spelling. It's only differences in grammar, such as word order, that would give it trouble.
Is there any reason nobody's tried adding such support for us/uk English? It would resolve some long-standing tension on enwiki. Would anons have to be given one variant or the other, or would they get untransformed text or what? Does the variant transformation apply to the edit page as well?