User:Christopherwoods/notes/EnglishVariants

Whilst reading around to see how other people handle edits where they use a different form of English (cf., American English vs. British English), I found a pretty good definition of how to handle this. The question asked was this:

American English VS British English conflicts on Wikipedia. How to solve this issue?
 * There always seems to be a conflict with American English spelling and British English spelling on Wikipedia. On some of the major articles, the discussions go on and on about what spelling should be used, and it often turns into a debate, usually resulting in a lot of anti American comments. A lot of people from the UK seem to get so angry about the spelling differences, boasting that their English is the correct English.


 * If Wikipedia was British, they wouldn't allow American English. Wikipedia was created by an American and it's based in the United States, so wouldn't it make sense to make American English the standard for all articles?

So, courtesy of Nihiltres on Yahoo Answers: —
 * No, it would not make sense to make American English the standard for all articles. One of Wikipedia's core policies is that of the "neutral point of view", which is already difficult on the English language edition considering that most users come from the United States and the great majority from other English-language countries (I am a good example; I am Canadian). Selecting American English over the others would compromise that neutral point of view by enforcing an American bias, and potentially alienate editors from other English-speaking countries such as Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, and so forth, who would probably prefer their varieties of English.


 * Don't worry, there's a good system for managing the chaos. It is officially part of the Wikipedia Manual of Style (available at < http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style >)


 * If an article is related to a location, it should use a variety of English spelling (or even vocabulary) relevant to that location. So "New York" will use American spelling, "Montreal" will use Canadian spelling, and "Lord of the Rings" will use British spelling (as the trilogy originated there). What matters is that each article should use only one variety, with an exception for literal quotes of textual material.


 * If an article is not related to some location (or is related to multiple locations with different varieties), then first one can try standardizing (or "standardising") to whatever variant is more prevalent in the article, which is the easiest thing to do. If this is contested, it should be changed to whichever variant was used first, that is, when the article was created, or the earliest revision of the article that uses one or the other, *not* which one is linearly first in the article.


 * These simple rules should solve almost all conflicts.
 * Source(s):
 * The specific Manual of Style entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style#National_varieties_of_English

I agree with this approach and I follow these guidelines.

Ça y'est!