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Why not settle on a standard written English?

Allowing American, British or Indian or whatever forms of English for various articles is inconsistent and difficult to review for editing. I think we should move English Wikipedia to a standard written English.

Of course this raises the question of which form of English to use. I propose American English because 1) it has more native speakers, 2) in a very few cases it is arguably simpler, and 3) Wikipedia originates in America.

Or maybe someone can create a tool that converts British spellings and terms to American spellings and terms and vice versa? We could use the tool to translate/filter in real time the reader's preference.

I am watching comments on this - Thanks Tee Owe 17:17, 20 February 2007 (UTC)

Actually English English is used by far more people, all over the word. American English is only used in one country. Also English English is the correct form of English, as its name would suggest. Only England gets to decide the correct way to speak the English language, the correct way to cook English food, etc. That doesn't mean people must speak English the way the English do, or must cook English food the way the English do, only that others shouldn't claim to do it the official way and force everyone to comply. Carl Kenner 11:11, 15 April 2007 (UTC)
It's been proposed many times before and rejected each of those times. Use American English and you get accused of American-centric bias. Use any other version and it's that particular bias. You can make a case for any of them. Alexj2002 17:37, 20 February 2007 (UTC)
Also, please see the current (on-going) discussion here: Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style (national varieties of English) – Kieran T (talk) 17:50, 20 February 2007 (UTC)
By using a standard form of English you may alienate people. Old habits die hard and having learnt how to spell British English (the right way to me) I will automatically write this version almost certainly without thinking about standard spellings. There is also the problem that a lot of people will spell it their own way as they don't want to spell it any other anyway.
If this were a specifically purely American project, perhaps the spelling would be changed by someone else and nobody would notice, but with so many British, Indian and other native spellers an automatic bot would cause people to take offense and change spellings back to what they think is right- causing an edit war. It could also lead to counter bots...
A particular problem to the (majority) of now and again users who would likely not be aware of any standarised rules in place- seeing a bot constantly change their spelling would likely aggravate a number of people. Bobbacon 18:59, 20 February 2007 (UTC)
I think he/she meant a javascript tool to display the user's preferred format (as is currently done with dates). That would be a great idea, but it would take a long time to write due to the many varities of English, and until then, pages should stay as they are. DB (talk) 02:46, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

If this were a purely American project, then Wikipedia would have so much less information. If America only had it's own information, then America would have so much less of it. This is the beauty of the internet, it shares a lot of information. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 63.197.69.171 (talk)

Settle on a standard ... can o' worms. The Americans will want it to be theirs citing reasons such as Tee Owe has. The Brits will want it to be theirs arguing that theirs came first. The Aussies will support the Brits but will really want Australian English to be the standard baulking at words such as lorry and aubergine. Kiwis will do similarly to the Aussies but in their own slightly different way. The Canadians will support the Brits on spelling but will prefer American vocab and they too will really want Canadian English ... it'll never work.
As for using a conversion tool ... yes, that may be a possibility. Of course, it has been suggested before and gathered somedeal of support ... opposition too. The discussion, however, seemed to peter out and was all but forgotten.
The idea was, naturally, not without its difficulties. For example, dialect differences go beyond simple questions of spelling involving vocabulary, punctuation and even grammar. Another problem brought up was what to about page titles. I believe I have found something of a solution to this. Jimp 09:00, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

My (admittedly thoroughly unrealistic) modest proposal is at User:Angr/Unified English Spelling. —Angr 10:35, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

May I please warn against the pervasive corruption of AMERICAN English by Hollywood, or "Hollyork" as Fred Reed calls it (Google for "Hollyork Nation" to see discussion). The malign effect of the alien "Hollyork" on the English language generally is aggravated in respect of British English by tainting of British English through the flood of "Hollyork English" language pouring into the parlours of the native speakers of British English (that is to say, mainly the inhabitants of Australasia, South Africa, the rest of the Commonwealth except Canada, and where English is a vital second or alternative language in Commonwealth countries such as the continent of India). For example, in competent British grammars (such as the small but authoritative guide, "The Complete Plain Words") variations called "Americanisms" are acknowledged and then either accommodated or rejected with explanation. In neither American nor British English, however, is there any room for Hollyork solecisms such as (to cite but one) the abandonment of the adverbial form of "good", as in the corrupt expression "He did good" when good is NOT meant as a noun. Or such uneven constructions such as, Question: "Have you a coat?" Answer: "Yes I do" (or "No I do not") so common in cinema and TV scripts from Hollywood. In our opinion American and British English are identical grammatically and vary (legitimately) only in local geographical usages of spelling and colloquial idiom. The writer must be expected to know enough grammar to know all about these (and about his reader) when he takes up his pen. The reader must, equally, be expected also to know of these local or topical variations and how to handle them. This cannot excuse those who say (for example) "lay" when they mean "lie " even if they are on TV acting the part of a woman president of the USA or one of her White House advisors. The grammar of the English Language is common to both the USA and the Commonwealth. It seems it is simply less well taught and used in the USA; or their teaching is swamped by the immediacy of the alien Hollyork element. Mentorsmentor 10:38, 29 March 2007 (UTC)

Screenwriters strive for accuracy in depicting their characters, not accuracy in grammar. It is a poor writer who gives Ma and Pa Kettle the diction of Noel Coward. And "Have you a coat?" is a British construction. Americans say "Do you have a coat?" to which "Yes, I do" is a logical reply. --Tysto 01:04, 17 April 2007 (UTC)

The simple answer to the original question is "because it is unworkable and will sorely piss people off no matter what 'standard' is chosen". — SMcCandlish [talk] [cont] ‹(-¿-)› 02:09, 24 April 2007 (UTC)

A standard English is needed purely for uniformity; the lack thereof often moves my reading over to other language wikis. A standard, possibly BBC English is needed so wikipedia does not look horrible. If it makes people mad then there are many people who get mad over absolutely nothing. I would go through and change to the new uniform language quite a bit if a uniform standard was chosen. Spacedwarv 01:54, 11 May 2007 (UTC)

Romanization

Is there any established policy for romanisation? I've been looking, but can't find it stated anywhere. It seems to me there are many inconsistencies, at least for Russian, and it would be nice if we could just standardise on scientific transliteration which is a blind substitution algorithm. This does mean Boris Yeltsin becomes Boris Elcin and Nikita Khrushchev becomes Nikita Xruščëv. The spellings in use are quite arbitrary anyway, and completely foreign(!) to, say, German speakers of English, which are accustomed to Jeltsin and Chruschtschow. Anyhow, if that is too drastic, I would at least like to see a standard for simple things like -ий, which is written as -y or -ij, and -ич, which alternates between -ey and -ei. I'm sure there are similar issues for CJK which should be addressed, too. Kjetilho 02:15, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

I'd support a standard romanization for the transliteration in, say, Russian grammar. But Nikita Xruščëv is absolutely ridiculous, particularly since it's even further away from Chruschtschow than Khrushchev is. Strad 00:02, 26 February 2007 (UTC)
I think any standardized schemes used elsewhere recognize that established spellings need to stay, or at least they should recognize it, although there's still "Tolstoy" and "Tolstoi" around. I'm running into problems with Yiddish poets taken from the Britannica Book of the Year volumes — the spellings are different from our article names, and sometimes there are three or four different spellings on the Internet. I think we should find whatever romanization systems are already out there and grasp whatever is most popular. And never let go. Noroton 20:30, 8 March 2007 (UTC)
In German the man is known as Jelzin, in French it is Yeltsine if I remember correctly.
Anyhow, if you wanted to transliterate names originaly written in cyrillic into the latin/roman script, ISO 9:1995 = GOST 7.79 would be the standard of choice today. It is independent on the source language and has an 1:1 mapping of letters, which gives us Hruŝëv or instance. Likewise you would use ISO 3602 Strict instead of Hepburn romanization for Japanese names. The other option is transcription which by concept is rather vague, but more helpful to the layman. Christoph Päper 12:37, 19 March 2007 (UTC)

Titles in picture descriptions

Currently Harold Wilson has the correct titling for the main description of his name (i.e., basically none). However, the caption of the picture describes him as "The Rt Hon Harold Wilson Baron Wilson of Rievaulx, KG, OBE, FRS, PC" Am I correct to presume that the MOS rules apply to the picture description as well and so this should be reduced to simply "Harold Wilson"? JoshuaZ 20:02, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

That's actually the infobox title, not the caption; but, generally, no: rules applying to article titles do not necessarily apply to text within articles. In this case, I believe it's actually common practice to use the full form initially in the article, even if the title is a considerably shortened version. Kirill Lokshin 21:28, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

Use of the Latin Alphabet

I am trying to find a standard or comment about the use of non English characters in articles.

The basic English (Latin) alphabet does not include diacritics. For instance in the article Māori the word Maori is written as Māori all the way through. This also happens in the article Romanization of Japanese where romaji is often written rōmaji. The word Māori is not an English word, the English word is Maori. I understand it is important to include diacritics at the beginning of the article as foreign words (like Japanese) are included as a reference eg. "Kanji (Japanese: 漢字 (help·info)) are the Chinese characters ...". But using diacritics throughout the article is incorrect as it is not English.

Any thoughts or pointers to a guidline highly appreciated. Brettr 06:57, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

But using diacritics throughout the article is incorrect as it is not English. I don't think that's necessarily true. That certainly is the situation with Mexico (which is México in Spanish, but almost never written as such in English). But the Polish złoty uses the stroked l both in the title and text of the article, and I imagine the only reason you'd leave it out is because of technical restrictions. Mandating one practice or the other would ultimately produce unsatisfactory results (e.g., either México and złoty or Mexico and zloty). Strad 00:38, 27 February 2007 (UTC)
I appreciate your reply but that's not really an answer, that's just another example of what I'm talking about, a stroked l is not an English character it's a Polish character. If we allow these characters do we allow Москва́ for Moscow? Which characeters do we allow? The capital of Japan is 東京 but in English we write Tokyo losing quite a bit of meaning. The fact that Unicode allows us to mix any character from any language with English doesn't mean we should. Brettr 03:19, 27 February 2007 (UTC)
The point that I'm trying to make is that some words are spelled with their original diacritics and others aren't. I imagine it has some correlation with how long the word has been used in English texts. Moscow is always Moscow in English and never Москва (or even Moskva); that's just the way it is. Then there is the question of when a word is really "English"—is café an English word loaned from French, or still just a French word? I suggest that when this sort of dispute arises, we should search Google Books or something similar to see if one version is preferred over the other in academic texts. Strad 03:27, 28 February 2007 (UTC)
Diacritics are used in English. They're just not common. Some writers prefer to use them and others prefer not to. It's not all that rare to see diacritics on words such as façade and naïve. Others take things even further and come out with stuff like coöperate. Saying that the use of diacritics is not English is much like saying that spellings such as centre and metre are not English. Jimp 07:34, 2 March 2007 (UTC)
This is usually a problem with foreign words, oftentimes place names and names of people. In general, most written English does not use accents, diaereses, cedillas, breath marks, vowel pointings and so on ('though exceptions have been noted above). In many cases there is a non-modified equivalent in general English usage, occasionally following rules, such as the replacement of Scandinavian ø with oe, æ with ae and å with aa. I would tentatively suggest that an early reference is made in an article using the full foreign panoply of letter modifications, and subsequent uses are the 'simplified' English one. Using fully accented/marked/pointed/whatever text throughout seems more like an affectation to me. That's my opinion. WLDtalk|edits 15:33, 2 March 2007 (UTC)
It's been an interesting discussion but it doesn't seem that others find this as important as I do, possibly as I'm an expat. I certainly agree with WLD. Words like café are obviously accepted as English words but maintaining the use of a foreign character set because that is the way it's written in the original language (eg złoty) seems wrong to me. Brettr 04:32, 9 March 2007 (UTC)
Rōmaji is not an English word. You would not find it in an English-French dictionary when you try to translate the article into French. It is one of the standard ways of transcribing the Japanese word. There are other ways of transcribing it, such as Roomaji. Words like Rōmaji should be in italics the first time they are used in an article, and non-italics the rest of the time, but always with their diacritics.
Māori on the other hand is identical to the (almost) English word Maori but with the accents from the original Maori word it was borrowed from. Where the (almost) English word is identical to the original Maori (or whatever language) word but without diacritics, it is just as easy for English speakers to read with the original accents, and more educational for them. Also for the names of people, nationalities, or countries, it is considered polite and respectful to those people to write the name with the original diacritics if the spelling is otherwise identical. If it makes no extra effort for the reader, then people should use the original word instead of the borrowed one, to educate the reader and to show respect. Carl Kenner 11:57, 15 April 2007 (UTC)

cquote tag

So what was the consensus? It has been discussed several times on this talk and the template was put up for TFD and was voted keep. So what does MOS have to say about these templates... nothing? Shouldn't we have something in there? Even if there is no consensus on the use of the templates, we could at least put that in there. Discuss the quotation templates and what ones are approved and what ones have disagreement among editors. I've replaced them in the past for blockquotes but I'm seeing them more and more. Heck - even Jimbo's article has one on it. Morphh (talk) 20:12, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

I support the use, have used it myself, and feel that when used properly, it adds "attractiveness" to the article. I use it for longer quotes which, if used in a book, would be indented, or to highlight an important shorter quote. Yes, something should be in the MOS, though. Akradecki 23:46, 1 March 2007 (UTC)
I have read previous discussion on this and I thought the consensus was that cquote should only be used for pullout quotes. Currently the MoS already says that quotations should be formatted with <blockquote>, so no change is necessary. Also, I have been off-wiki for a while, but I vaguely remember that the cquote template should be rewritten to use a subclassed <blockquote>. Or has this already been done? Part of the reason discussions are not always followed through until a discussion is reached, is that overactive "archivers" remove discussions prematurely, making it hard to find out who said what when and why. Although perhaps that's not what happened in this case. As I said, I have been relatively off-wiki for a while, a situation that may still continue for a while. Shinobu 19:00, 23 March 2007 (UTC)

Flag icons in infoboxes

I see in the archives this has come up before but I can't find anywhere which shows the consensus as to whether these are a good or bad thing - two examples of where this is an issue are the silly edit warring on Nicole Kidman regarding her nationality; and the confusing situation on Emma Watson (Union Flag and Flag of France next to her place of birth - clearly she was not born in two different countries). I'm confident that I'm not alone in thinking that a guideline or policy on this should be set out clearly somewhere to improve consistency across articles. An essay exists at WP:FLAG, but as far as I can see there is no existing policy or guideline either at the WP:MOS or the Biography WikiProject. QmunkE 15:34, 3 March 2007 (UTC)

I would also appreciate some guidance wrt flags used in info boxes. The Michael J. Fox page has a slightly different problem than the one described by Qmunke above: There is no stability as it changes from canada's old flag, to their new flag, to no flag and back again (and sometimes there are also province flags, once I think there were three displayed at once). R. Baley 04:11, 10 March 2007 (UTC)
Just ran across this discussion: Wikipedia talk:Manual of style/Archive 66 R. Baley 04:40, 10 March 2007 (UTC)
See new draft of Wikipedia:Don't overuse flags, a to-be-proposed guideline (probably as part of MOS). If you see a short page there that contradicts itself, that means it's been reverted to an older version. The latest version of the comprehensive redraft (as of this writing) is available in the history. — SMcCandlish [talk] [cont] ‹(-¿-)› 02:13, 24 April 2007 (UTC)

Alphabetization

Why, oh why, is there no manual of style guideline on alphabetization? I can't begin to tell you how many times one comes across completely incorrect alphabetization. For instance, in Template:India states, there is a list of states which puts "Uttarakhand" before "Uttar Pradesh". This is just wrong (it is also unfixable by me, since the current order of the list corresponds to numbering on a map, which I'm not in a position to fix). It is not how alphabetization is done, and every time we do this kind of thing it makes us look stupid and unprofessional. Can we please have a guidelines with respect to correct alphabetization? (I believe that correct alphabetization also counts "Mc" as though it is "Mac", and "St." as though it is "Saint," but I'm willing to discuss those). It certainly does not follow a "Uttarakhand" comes before "Uttar Pradesh" policy, and we ought to be clear about this. john k 18:44, 3 March 2007 (UTC)

I've fixed it. =Nichalp «Talk»= 06:01, 4 March 2007 (UTC)
Agree with John Kenney Typesetter 14:44, 4 March 2007 (UTC)
There are different, equally valid standards for collation. Wikipedia should select one to be used throughout, though. Christoph Päper 12:56, 19 March 2007 (UTC)

Capitalization of "prime minister"

There's a bit of a disconnect in the manual when comparing the capitaliztion styles recommended for "president" and "prime minister". In both cases, the manual says you should use lowercase when the office is meant "generically", but that word seems to be used differently, given that "the British Prime Minister" is suggested (whereas we would certainly write "the American president").

This comes up because of a dispute over how the article on the prime minister of Italy should be titled. I think it looks better at prime minister of Italy, but a couple of people have moved it to Prime Minister of Italy on the grounds that articles on other countries' prime ministers use the capital M. It could be that it's a slightly different case, given that "prime minister" (or primo ministro) is not the formal name of the office in Italian, but rather an informal description (legally, he's presidente del consiglio dei ministri). --Trovatore 16:01, 7 March 2007 (UTC)

Intuitively, that makes all the difference for me. "Official title" status is the reason things become capitalised, surely? If it's not actually the title, but just the rôle, then it should be lower case, in the same way that one wouldn't describe the driver of a bus as the "Bus Driver" — it's a job, not a title. – Kieran T (talk) 16:05, 7 March 2007 (UTC)

Well, that's one strong argument. To be honest with you, though, I think there's an even stronger one: I really think it would be odd to see in print a sentence like "Today, the Prime Minister said that...", which is apparently what the current MOS advises. Is that really what we want? Of course in front of a name you'd use it -- "Today, Prime Minister Harper said..." -- but without a name? Really? --Trovatore 07:39, 8 March 2007 (UTC)

...and I think it's even weirder, if there's no particular individual being referred to. That is, surely we want to say "the functions of the prime minister include..." and not "the functions of the Prime Minister include..."; that's pretty much an on-point application of the principle that generic uses take the lower case, but contradicts the rule about "the". --Trovatore 07:42, 8 March 2007 (UTC)


I think one reason Prime Minister is capitalized is that ministers and prime ministers are called by that title. Where the Americans would say "Mr President, thank you" in the Commonwealth the equivalent is "Prime Minister, thank you". Brettr 04:25, 9 March 2007 (UTC)

OK, that sounds plausible, but it's not a very good reason to capitalize "minister" in the title of the article. The article is about the office, not a specific individual addressed by a title, so it's more a "generic" usage. --Trovatore 04:38, 9 March 2007 (UTC)


I have started the "requested moves" process at talk:Prime Minister of Italy; please feel free to contribute. --Trovatore 08:55, 10 March 2007 (UTC)

Americans are generally of a mind to capitalize anything that seems important, including their own job titles. It is common to read of Customer Sales Representatives, let alone Presidents and Vice Presidents. By any professional publishing standard, this is poor writing, but it is a battle I don't see being fought well on Wikipedia. Incidentally, it is traditional to capitalize a title used as a name ("Have you talked to Father today?"), so "Mr. President, thank you" and "Prime Minister, thank you" are very appropriate, but not "The Prime Minister said...". --Tysto 01:17, 17 April 2007 (UTC)

Universally accepted spellings

In the Mary Wollstonecraft article there was an edit war over whether to use American or British English. It turned out that all of the disputed spellings involved "-ise" vs "ize". Since both American spelling and Oxford spelling used "-ize" for the disputed words and Oxford spelling is acceptable in British English, the dispute was resolved by agreeing to use the Oxford spelling in those cases (thus both the "British" and "American" sides won). This seems to be a logical extension of the existing directive to "Try to find words that are common to all." Since I think this might be helpful to other editors as well, I have added the following suggestion under that directive:

  • If a certain spelling is acceptable universally, but another spelling is only used regionally, use the more widely accepted spelling. See Oxford spelling, for example.

I hope that is agreable to everyone. Kaldari 16:52, 7 March 2007 (UTC)

On second thought, I have removed the Sentence "See Oxford spelling, for example." as that might give some people the wrong idea, i.e. that we are universally endorsing all Oxford spelling. Kaldari 17:09, 7 March 2007 (UTC)
I am reversing the change. ** If a certain spelling is acceptable universally, but another spelling is only used regionally, use the more widely accepted spelling. because
American spelling is a specific region/dialect. I'm saying that if a particular word has a spelling which is accepted universally, for example "globalization", we should use that spelling. Since "globalization" is considered "correct" and widely used in the U.S., Britian, and all the English-speaking world (as far as I know), why should we ever use "globalisation" (which is only inconsistantly used in Britian and some Commonwealth countries)? Of course in the case of words like "analyse" or "defence" this would not be the case, since no spelling is acceptable as correct in both America and Britian. If this doesn't seem like a good suggestion (or is too simplistic), I'll leave it be. I imagine it would be a helpful way to avoid edit wars, but maybe that's an overly optimistic idea. I admit I'm not an expert on British usage of English so maybe it wouldn't work as well as I imagine in all cases :) Kaldari 23:27, 7 March 2007 (UTC)
Overly simplistic ... yes, that's how it seems to me. What does it mean to be "universally acceptable"? Inspite of Oxford, Fowler, etc. it is ~ise which seems to be prefered by most ordinary folk outside North America. I certainly would not swallow somebody's izeising an article that I'd spelt. Jimp 08:02, 8 March 2007 (UTC)
I disagree with Kaldari's proposed rule. Spellings do not affect intelligibility, so to a large extent this is a matter of Wikipedia faithfully reflecting the diversity of English as it exists. The only case where I might agree, would be if, for example, the first major contributor used -ize in a British-related article. Since that is also an acceptable spelling in Britain, albeit a minority one, maybe it shouldn't be changed. Now I'm just guessing, but I would say that -ize/-ise is probably about 100%/0% in the U.S. and 5%/95% in the U.K. This rule, if applied to change -ise spellings to -ize just turns into a backdoor way of eliminating what is, in practice, the British form. So my opinion is that for U.S./Canada-related articles it should be -ize; for country-neutral articles, the first one used; and for U.K.-related articles either -ise or the first one used, and this point could be debated, in view of the "nationally predominant form" criterion. Joeldl 09:43, 10 March 2007 (UTC)
I've realized since that post that there are cases where I would agree Kaldari's proposal deserves consideration. What do people think of cases like gaol/jail where intelligibility problems might reasonably arise for some people? Joeldl 09:53, 10 March 2007 (UTC)
I like the proposal. Other editors have, on more than one occasion, quoted Oxford spellings or definitions to back up an argument. I know Wikipedia is not a print encyclopedia, but I think it's arguable that Oxford spelling is what would be used in a formal academic setting in areas that would use primarily British spellings. Frankly, I think it's sort of silly that we have to have this discussion in the first place ;) but in cases like Joeldl's ("gaol" vs. "jail") I also think there is an intelligibility issue to consider, so we should have some sort of more explicit guidance here.--chris.lawson 12:31, 10 March 2007 (UTC)
The answer is surely simple, en.wikipedia.org should always use British English and there should be a us.wikipedia.org that uses the alternative version. M100 11:45, 11 March 2007 (UTC)
Funny.. There is already guidance in this (see National varieties of English). In addition, I would point to other policies that specify that we should prefer to what the majority of English speakers would most easily recognize, with a reasonable minimum of ambiguity (see naming and abbreviation usage). Morphh (talk) 12:33, 11 March 2007 (UTC)
I can't help but feel that there is a hidden deception/distraction/diversion/what-ever-y-call-it in this argument, unintentional to be sure but real. The dictionaries do not prescribe what is acceptable. Oxford may accept ~ize but does Oxford speak for all English people, all British people, all people from Commonwealth countries? Outside of North America, as I'd mentioned, it is ~ise which is overwhelmingly prefered. How then do you argue that ~ize is "universally acceptable"? Does Wikipedia want to send the message that "Your spelling is not welcome here."? As for intelligibility, ~ize vs. ~ise is a non-issue but even such spellings as gaol should not be problematic for people with a little education ... and if it is, look it up: it's an encyclopædia. Whether or not it was the intention the net effect of such a policy, if implimented, would a degree of Americanisation of Wikipedia. Jimp 01:11, 20 March 2007 (UTC)
Are you saying that if a British editor used the ize spelling in a Britain-related article, that should be changed despite its being preferred by Oxford and by some Brtitish publications? I have argued that both spellings should be accepted, except in US/Canada-related articles. Also, I don't think gaol should be disallowed on pages that are most likely to be of interest to Britons, but since it is now the minority spelling in Britain, as I read somewhere, why insist on it (where it was used first) in pages on country-neutral subjects? I think it's a bit presumptuous to say that people are uneducated if they are unfamiliar with foreign spellings. It may be unfortunate (and I think it is), but as things stand British, Canadian, Australian (...) authors have their spelling Americanized for US editions of their works, so a person could very well have read plenty of Commonwealth/Irish authors, but minus their spellings. And Wikipedia should be as accessible as possible to those who aren't as educated as you'd like, right? After all, you can't guess what gaol is by sounding it out. Joeldl 00:22, 21 March 2007 (UTC)
It probably was somewhat presumtuous, yes. And you're right: it is not possible to guess what gaol is by sounding it out but it's not hard to look it up (especially if it's hyperlinked). I don't see there being that great a difference between gaol vs. jail and ~ise vs. ~ize: they're all acceptable spellings. Apply the rule equally: whatever was there first stays (country-neutral subjects). Why make an exception for gaol? Similarly, if an editor (British or not) used the ~ize spelling in a Britain-related article, let it stay. Jimp 04:10, 22 March 2007 (UTC)
I think gaol is now seen as rather archaic in British English, and jail the more normal form, so jail should be preferred. This may be an example of American usage gradually taking over the world. But the opposite seems to be happening with ~ise vs. ~ize. A few years ago the translation services of the EU institutions decided that their English-language output would use ~ise consistently because ~ize just looks to most people very specifically American, whatever Oxford might say. BTW The Economist, though published in Britain, sells (I believe) more copies in the USA than anywhere else, so its style guide might not be indicative of standard British English usage and anyway has always been seen by many as somewhat idiosyncratic. Woblosch 13:13, 1 May 2007 (UTC)
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