[Wikipedia-l] Re: technical measures for English variations...

Wed Oct 6 11:25:23 UTC 2004

David Friedland wrote:
> I recognize that spoken British English and spoken American English
> are very different in many subtle and usually ainconsequential ways,
> as you say, but _written_ British English and American English,
> which are much more standardized, tend to differ in certain specific
> ways...

Although I still disagree with the conclusion, I did want to
acknowledge that this is certainly true.

> Where a word has different spellings/usages, the spelling/usage that has 
> the most number of Google hits shall be the spelling/usage used on 
> Wikipedia. If the spelling/usage with the most number of Google hits 
> changes, then so shall the spellings/usages on Wikipedia.
> 
> At least this way we can be sure that the spellings/usages we use will 
> be ones used by a majority that is based on actual data. It's 
> incontrovertible, democratic, neutral, and completely dialect-agnostic. 
> Not to mention consistent.

This does have some merit, and of course "number of Google hits" is a
traditional method of settling other disputes.  But the problem as I
see it is that American English is much more common on the Internet
than other variants, so the rule would in practice amount to "always
use American English" -- and this strikes me as deeply undesirable.

I suppose the biggest area where we differ is in our estimation of the
magnitude of the problem.  I view the differences as relatively minor,
and as far as I have been able to determine, the number of edit wars
and acrimonious arguments about this has been quite small overall.
Are people really getting upset about this?

--Jimbo