[WikiEN-l] "refactoring" signatures (was: cancelation of the deletion review of the satanism userbox)

Fri Jun 9 22:48:56 UTC 2006

On 6/9/06, Death Phoenix <originaldeathphoenix at gmail.com> wrote:
> *sigh* People pursuing BE and AE should see what it's like to be a writer
> who has to write a certain way because our style guide says so. Our company
> writes in AE, while I personally dislike AE and prefer to write in BE as
> much as possible. I write in AE in my company because I'd likely get fired
> if I didn't.

I am in that exact same situation - I'm employed to write in AmE,
although AusE (or even BE) is my preference. It's confusing, and
mostly manifests itself with words like "behavio[u]r", and
occasionally "level[l]ed" etc.

> I prefer to to write in BE, but when I see people trying to convert American
> articles to BE, such as [[Special Activities Division]], it annoys me
> greatly. Same with British articles to AE (such as [[Harry Potter]]). This
> also applies to articles that could be written in either AE or BE, but were
> first written in one form, and people come to convert it over. I wish I
> could apply a category or template to indicate that the article is written
> in AE, and please piss off with the BE conversions (and vice versa).

I tend to think conversions are a kind of "noise" that should be
justified by a considerable contirbution. A 20 paragraph article that
becomes a 25 paragraph article accompanied by a conversion from BE to
AE seems like a good deal. A conversion with no other redeeming
features tends to grate, however.

Steve