On 20/09/05, Jack & Naree jack.macdaddy@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.