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