[Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia English English

[Andrew Gray]

On 19/09/05, James R. Johnson <modean52 at comcast.net> 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).

And even with those dialect-specific words, there *are* points of
absolute mutual unintelligibility - table as a verb, what pavement is,
what a thong is - but we handle them just fine in wiki, by
common-sense disambiguation. For example -

[[Table (verb)]] discusses both instances, though I suspect we might
need to make sure that where possible we use different terminology in
actual articles.

[[Pavement]] directs to [[Pavement (disambiguation)]], which links to
both, though it's not a very clear disambig notice - if you've not
encountered the word "sidewalk" before you'd be forgiven for thinking
the UKian use would be under [[Pavement (roads)]]. Will rewrite that
later on.

[[Thong]] doesn't even bother mentioning dialects of English, just
points to various meanings.

-- 
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk