On 11/10/05, Freya cybercat@redjellyfish.net wrote:
We need a committee to check the grammar in Wikipedia articles and make corrections! We need some really picky people on this committee too - and I will be glad to help.
English grammar is very flexible, so if you find something that doesn't look right to you it's probably better to fix it yourself--if it's really that important to you--than to hope for some committee to come up with the One True Wikipedia Grammar (which is feasible) and impose it on all of Wikipedia (which is a bit pie-in-the-sky).
The other day someone came on IRC moaning about the use of "which" in nonrestrictive clauses, which is apparently a heinous crime in American English but perfectly acceptable (and even sometimes prefered) in most other forms. My take on this--as with most style questions--is that we have thousands, of regular editors, and while it's nice to have stuff like our Manual of style, and Strunk and White, Fowler, etc as guides, we will probably have to permit our normal editing processes to take care of the question of grammar. We have enough silly edit wars about whether or not to use emdashes and whatnot. A crusade on the nonrestrictive clause would not be of much use to Wikipedia if it drove away good people, as such battles invariably do.