Community Wishlist Survey 2022/Editing/Uniformity in spelling

Uniformity in spelling

  • Problem: Some spellings have some variations, such as British English versus American English ("colour" versus "color"). This is prevalent in nearly all the languages. Some pages use some variant, while in other pages, the words are spelled differently.
  • Proposed solution: The editor should get a warning about the most prevalent spelling and the editor could mark "this is also spelled as......"
  • Who would benefit: All the stakeholders, i.e. readers, editors
  • More comments:
  • Phabricator tickets:
  • Proposer: Anupamdutta73 (talk) 10:11, 12 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Discussion

Seems related to phab:T265163. — xaosflux Talk 15:18, 14 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

This is already implemented as template in English Wikipedia. In Chinese Wikipedia due to the adoption of Language Converter this is a non-problem because the converter would automatically convert different words/different spellings/etc into user-selected variant. C933103 (talk) 00:51, 16 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Even if I can guess it a bit, I really don't get to grasp the explanation of this proposal. Could you develop it a bit more? Because in Catalan, we have two official Academies and our Wikipedia style book allows to use both variants indistinctly for the first editor who creates the article. Then, other editors must respect the first variant used and keep consistent along the text. If you could provide some examples, it would be great. I assume you mean kind of reminding the 2nd editor that this article follows a specific variant and suggesting the changes for it? Xavier Dengra (MESSAGES) 13:45, 22 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Not OP but Chinese has variations of their writing system, due to historical issues and geographic span. For example, there is Traditional and Simplified Chinese. Simplified Chinese came out of Mainland China in the 1950s and isn't used by Taiwan & Taiwanese. Here's a sentence with the same meaning but visually different characters:
  • 报告录下来了 (Simplified)
  • 報告錄下來了 (Traditional)
Means exactly the same, "the speech has been tape-recorded".
Users of Chinese Wikipedia can switch back and forth between those two plus a few other standards (Hong Kong, Macao, etc) thanks to the Language Converter. Xn00bit (talk) 19:33, 28 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I do not see any reason for this to come to fruition. Uniformity in spelling provides little besides being easier on the eyes. Bristledidiot (talk) 18:56, 28 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I rather agree, my gut feeling is that there's not that many variations in British and American English spellings for one to be unrecognizable to the other. Xn00bit (talk) 19:36, 28 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Voting