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

[Rowan Collins]

On 20/09/05, Jack & Naree <jack.macdaddy at gmail.com> wrote:
>  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".

And what if they search for "red", which version does it link to?

>  ...for words with different meanings but identical orthographies you get a
> disambiguation page; 

Fine, logical, and what I would presume we'd do already.

> 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.

Why? Just because the headword is different, you suggest we manually
copy all changes to one onto the other? Or perhaps the entry on that
plant in a US encyclopedia and in a UK one would be fundamentally
different in some way? And what, as I say, of other articles which
happen to mention, and probably link to, the term in one form or the
other? Should they link both?

Somebody has mentionned that something similar is done on Wiktionary,
but that is a very different situation: in a dictionary, the entire
article is discussing the headword, as a word; in an encyclopedia, on
the other hand, the article is discussing the entity denoted by the
headword. That is, a dictionary entry for "aubergine" is discussing
the meaning, etymology, etc of that string of letters; an encyclopedia
entry for "aubergine" is discussing the plant itself, using the string
of letters merely as a label. It follows that whereas the dictionary
entries for the words "aubergine" and "eggplant" are distinct (because
they are two different words), the encyclopedia entries under those
two words will always be *exactly the same* - you might even put the
article under its scientific classification, but you'd still be
discussing the same plant (and you wouldn't suddenly be discussing it
in Latin, either).

I'm sorry to labour the point, but this is the major problem with
splitting up articles by dialect, whether in separate wikis or not -
it means that all those articles have to be written twice, or
constantly kept in synch, *even though they are for almost entirely
identical*. This seems to me a complete and blatant waste of effort.


Now, a few months back, when the orthography converter for Chinese was
being written (and please bear in mind that Chinese really does have
multiple different orthographies - they're related, but they're more
like different alphabets than the odd spelling difference), it was
suggested that something similar might be used in English (and
Scandinavian, and various other situations). I was opposed to that,
too, but less so - if implemented well, it would require very little
additional effort (discounting the effort of those implementing it),
because it would be automatic.

Indeed, the main problem would be defining the various variants (it
would be as arrogant to claim there are only two "proper" forms of
English as to claim there is only one) and making sure the right
things were "corrected" in the right way. And, as people pointed out,
there'd still be arguments over what the "correct" version was within
a particular variety, and there'd still be compromises needed on
grammar and punctuation issues, etc etc


>  Can we try and reach some consensus on this?

As others have pointed out, you seem to me to be very much in the
minority on this; everyone else seems to subscribe more-or-less to the
current consensus that it's really not that big a problem, and
certainly not worth multiplying our workload to avoid.

-- 
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]