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

[Stan Shebs]

David Friedland wrote:

>
> 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?
>
> <div style="border: 1px solid black; background: #ffefcf; padding: 
> 7px;">If you were looking for an article on the abbreviation "VFD", 
> please see [[VFD]].</div>
>
> {{Shortcut|[[WP:VFD]]}}
> {{deletiontools}}
> {{VfD_header}}
> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; 
> [http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Wikipedia:Votes_for_deletion&action=edit&section=0 
> <small>edit</small>]
>
Actually this already happens - look at article histories, and
you'll see dozens of editors not fixing obviously broken table or
image markups, and when I fix those myself, I'll get little
thank-you notes from people saying "I have no idea how those work".
Fortunately they occur in support bits like images, not in the content
proper. As Angela's excellent example shows, the markup can easily
overwhelm the text and render it as unreadable as any HTML hack.

> Rather than trying to live in the fiction that en-us and en-gb are 
> equally understandable and mutually compatible, we should admit that 
> they are different, that those differences can and empirically do 
> cause problems, and that we should create a solution to solve it.

So you're saying that there are Americans unable to follow articles
written in British style, and vice versa? I've not seen that - the
most common situation is where readers understand full well what is
being said, but object to the way it's being said, usually for
nationalist/chauvinist reasons. We should take our example from the
Portuguese, who recognize that there are local dialects, but who
have set themselves the goal of writing their encyclopedic material
in a dialect-neutral fashion.

Stan