Category talk:Wikipedia articles that use British English

Eh?

Could someone kindly explain to me the point of this category? --OhNoPeedyPeebles (talk) 18:18, 9 June 2012 (UTC)

Certainly not me! Actually the category only comprises those articles marked as using British English via the template. Many more undoubtedly use British English. Peter coxhead (talk) 18:10, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

So articles should be written in British English, what else? Indian English? Leeward Islands English? British Spanish? British Double Dutch? T A Francis (talk) 19:45, 5 January 2014 (UTC)

Presumably articles can be written in any variety of English for which there is a template; see Category:Wikipedia articles by national variety of English. That's the policy, it seems – as per WP:ENGVAR. Peter coxhead (talk) 22:55, 5 January 2014 (UTC)

I take it from the "Eh?" section heading that OhNoPeedyPeebles might be another Canadian. I just went through the category to see if there were any other instances of Canadian articles being tagged with "British English" as Talk:Indo-Canadians was (not that I can see, no there weren't any others). But in scanning it I DO have to wonder about the imposition of British spelling on countries where the local variety of English most in use is American....or distinct as e.g. Indian English or Philippines English would be. Do Belize and Jamaica use British spelling, for example? I know Korea doesn't - their English is modelled on American, as is Filipino. I 'get the point' with EU countries using British English as the standard there, but extending that worldwide and into non-geographic/national material (various scientific articles) as if by a very broad paintbrush gets me a bit edgy. No doubt American English has been imposed on articles that have nothing to do with the US en masse also, and we commonly see "corrections" on Canadian articles where Canadian spelling is changed to American. In the case of the Category:Power stations in Canada category and its child-cats, the main article is "electrical generating station" which is the normative Canadian use, followed by "powerhouse" and "power plant" but it was deemed by a small group of (British) Wikipedians that that category hierarchy-name would be imposed on Canada, and on the US.... "power station" in North America can also mean, and will tend to mean, a substation or switchyard or a video game. There was a (false) claim in that CfD that American power generation facilities use "power station" but an examination of US articles revealed nothing of the kind; many articles are just list of locations, without the full name of the generating facility given. But Mother Country Knows Best is how the rejection of the Canadian usage for Canadian categories came across. That's only one instance of this sort of broad-brush linguistic imperialism; the Indo-Canadians BE template came as a bit of a surprise to see, but wasn't all that surprising. We aren't part of the Empire anymore, neither is Belize or Jamaica, and some country-related articles e.g. those for Korea have never had British English in use.Skookum1 (talk) 02:21, 18 October 2014 (UTC)

Is 'eh?' a particularly Canadian usage? Whatever makes you think I'm Canadian based upon such a slight ejaculation? I question your sanity, sir (or madam). --OhNoPeedyPeebles (talk) 18:26, 14 May 2016 (UTC)

Duplicate category?

Why do we have Category:Wikipedia articles that use British English (populated by {{British English}}, a talk-page and edit-notice banner), and Category:Use British English (populated by the in-article template {{Use British English}}? These appear to be redundant. (This applies to the rest of the "[Wikipedia article that u|U]se Foo English" categories, too.) — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  19:17, 22 June 2018 (UTC)

A talk page template that generates a category puts the talk page in the category, whereas it should be the article that belongs there. So one answer is "because one category holds talk pages and the other articles". To arrive at only one category, we'd need a mechanism whereby a talk page template categorized the article – I don't think this is possible. Peter coxhead (talk) 22:14, 24 June 2018 (UTC)