[Wikipedia-l] Re: Re: Wikipedia English English

[Stephen Forrest]

On 9/20/05, Jack & Naree <jack.macdaddy at gmail.com> wrote:

>  That there be no redirection for words that are in *a* correct orthography.
>  Thus, if an American types a search for "color", they get the article in
> their orthography with the headword "color"; and if a
> non-American-English-speaker types in "colour", they get the article in
> their orthography with the headword "colour".
>  ...for words with different meanings but identical orthographies you get a
> disambiguation page; and, for articles about the same subject that have a
> different word for the thing - like Aubergine (Am-En "Eggplant") for
> example: you get a page for each; in each respective orthography.

I think this is certainly a more reasonable proposal than splitting
the English wikipedia.

The problem with this, however, is that the natural way to do it with
the current infrastructure is to have separate articles for each
orthography.   Though this introduces less
balkanisation than would separate wikis, it is still damaging.

For example, as a speaker of Canadian English I myself would never use
"aubergine" for "eggplant" (well, except when speaking French or
German), but I might possibly have something to contribute to an
article on this fruit which would be of interest to English speakers
who call it "aubergine".

A technical solution to avoid separate articles is to use some kind of
template variable, e.g. "{{PAGENAME}} is a fruit" and have the
variable filled in with the user's preference.  But this is
potentially confusing, and limits the way the article could be
written.

Steve