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

[Ray Saintonge]

Jack & Naree wrote:

>Anyway, by way of propsing a solution to the American-English problem, I 
>want to offer this and intermediate measure:
> 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 a simple, effective, and practical solution for all 
>languages where differences like this exist, like Spanish, French, 
>Portuguese, Italian, German, and Chinese, etc... Above all I think it's 
>pretty fair.
> Can we try and reach some consensus on this?
>
In Wiktionary, this is already being done.

I was among the most vocal in that project against this kind of 
redirect, and I found the proposed solution using the compound headword 
"color/colour" to be an abomination that stressed the worst of both 
worlds.  In most instances the two forms of the word are perfectly 
interchangeable, but there will nevertheless be specifically American or 
British contexts where only one form can be correct.

I've spurned the use of disambiguation pages to this end, but have 
preferred a cross reference to the other form on each page. If American 
forms seem to dominate perhaps it reflects the simple fact that more 
Americans are editing.

These issues are not new, and Wikipedia had no choice but to deal with 
the issue of the major dialects very early on in its life.  Establishing 
two separate projects for the two most important versions of the 
languagejust to accomodate spelling variants would not have been 
practical.  Had we agreed to that solution I would speculate that each 
of these projects would be less than half of its present size.  ... and 
we would still not have accomodated the most populous English-speaking 
country in the world.  Is it any wonder that your proposal was not taken 
as being serious?  The consensus is already there.

Ec