[Wikipedia-l] Re: [Wikitech-l] Hyperlink convention

[Angela]

On Thu, 30 Sep 2004 14:29:59 -0700, David Friedland <david at nohat.net> wrote:
> Is 
> The -{en-us colors; en-gb colours}- of the U.S. flag are red, white and
> blue.
> going to dissuade users from editing an article any more than the following?

I think you are over-simplifying the problem, David. My point earlier
was that changing from American to British English is about far more
than just swapping a few words.
In the example you give above, you'd actually need

The -{en-us colors; en-gb colours}- of the -{en-us U.S.; en-gb US}-
flag are red, white-{en-us ,; en-gb }-and blue.

This is not a natural way of writing and would be practically
impossible to read in the edit box, or on a diff page. The difference
between this and templates such as the VfD shortcut is that
{{Shortcut|[[WP:VFD]]}} very rarely needs to be edited. These are
add-ons to articles, not part of the body of text itself. There's no
need to ever learn what {{VfD header}} does, whereas if you want to
edit an article you would need to understand this proposed spelling
syntax.

Angela.