[Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia English English

[Delirium]

James R. Johnson wrote:

>But the issue is (to me, at least), that I can understand you, even if you
>spell funny (honour, colour, etc.) and have funny words (lift, pavement
>instead of elevator and sidewalk).  And do understand that I'm being
>slightly sarcastic here, please don't rant-reply.  Americans have some
>spellings, English have some spellings, but we can understand each other,
>except when we use our dialect-specific words.  I don't really think it
>appropriate to dialectualize the wikipedia unless there's mutual
>unintelligibility (as in the Frisian case, I think it was).
>  
>
I agree this is a good principle, and it does seem to be followed for 
the most part.  In the Chinese case, a little bit of creative 
machine-transliteration even made some *non* mutually intelligible 
scripts able to coexist on the same Wikipedia (because they happen to be 
close enough to a 1-to-1 mapping that 95% of the conversion can be done 
automatically).  As far as spreading knowledge goes, consolidating 
effort as much as possible makes semse, IMO.

(Although it seems the Scandinavian Wikipedias are going the opposite 
direction, creating a separate Wikipedia for each mutually-intelligible 
dialect.)

-Mark