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

[Stephen Forrest]

On 9/21/05, Jack & Naree <jack.macdaddy at gmail.com> wrote:
[snip]
> > I'm sure Canadians and Australians will be pleased to hear you
> > pronounce that from your golden pedestal. As will Indians, New
> > Zealanders, South Africans, etc etc. [It was pointed out, for
> > instance, that an Australian user would not wish to select either "US"
> > nor "British" spellings, because they would naturally use a mixture of
> > the two.]
>
>  I'm sorry, but there's no evidence to support that view. Provide evidence,
> and I'll agree with you. How does an Australian write "colour" then? They
> choose one or the other, if they wrote "culla" for instance, then I'd agree
> with you, but they don't, do they.

Whether Canadians or Australians have unique spellings or only use
some combination of British and American spellings is not the issue at
hand.  The point is that their spelling conventions *differ* from both
American and British conventions.  (At least Canadian English does: I
don't know Australian, and it seems closer to British.)  If you
believe that splitting the English wikipedia into "American" and
"English Squared" forms over spelling differences is justifiable, then
you should apply this rule consistently and have Wikipedias for all
the other orthographic dialects of English.  And that'd be reductio ad
absurdum, eh?

Steve