Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Archive 41

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Maybe I'm missing something but...

... was there consensus on the large, recent excisions from this document? - Jmabel | Talk 05:32, 17 January 2006 (UTC)

The edit summery says they were moved, and cites a talk page discussion but I don't see any such discussiuon and i am not convinced that this move is a good idea. DES (talk) 22:31, 17 January 2006 (UTC)

Be stronger about unnecessary Latin

I'm fairly sure it's not good Wikipedia style to use unnecessary Latin phrases and abbreviations when a perfectly good English version is available. The most common examples are e.g. and i.e.. These should be replaced with "for example" and "that is". Alternatively, the sentence containing the abbreviation should be rewritten entirely, because these abbreviations also seem to serve as flags that the writing around them is unclear and the writer is trying desperately to clarify things by sounding more important.

Would it be reasonable to add a note warning against e.g. and i.e. under the paragraph about unnecessary foreign phrases?

rspeer / ɹəədsɹ 20:39, 19 January 2006 (UTC)

Well, e.g., i.e., and etc. in particular are rather debatable when used properly, since they're widely understood, although I try to eliminate them. I think less controversial would be elimination of all other Latin, such as N.B., viz., and other Latin terms that have become unfamiliar among many audiences. Deco 20:45, 19 January 2006 (UTC)
I'd disagree about "widely understood" as I often ask folks whose work I'm reviewing what they stand for and mean, and so far I've met very few who had any idea. OTOH, I do spell out Nota Bene from time to time. Yes, I'd like a strong warning, and agree that it usually means it was copied without undertanding (often from an academic source, or here the 1911 encyclopedia), and is therefore a strong indication of need to re-write.
--William Allen Simpson 00:05, 20 January 2006 (UTC)
There is already a note about not using Latin abbreviations in the usage section. I don't know if it would be appropriate to move it to the foreign phrases section, as the latin terms in questions aren't really "foreign", they're just academic. And yes, I've met plenty of people who have no idea what "i.e." or "e.g." mean, much less "n.b." or "viz.". I think "etc." might be the lone exception. Kaldari 00:14, 20 January 2006 (UTC)
Yeah, I agree it's not really "foreign". As for how well people understand i.e. and e.g., it's true that people often have at best a vague sense of where the two are used and often mix them up in their own writing, but at least they aren't bewildered on seeing them. I still prefer "for example" and "that is", though — they're usually short enough. Deco 00:46, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

I have never met a person who did not know what e.g means in practice, even if they did not know the words behind the letters. Frankly, if they don't, they should sue their teacher for incompetence. They are used universally in English worldwide (and no, not academic English. They feature in The Sun, Britain's leading tabloid). Dumbing down language to the standard of a comic is not an option in an encyclopaedia. Perhaps you might like to request that people don't use colons and semi-colons, given that many people seem not to understand what they are too. And while we are at it, why not ban commas altogether, given how few people seem to understand them. In addition many people don't seem to know capitalisation rules. So lets abolish capitalisation also. Then there's pesky words with more than two syllables. This really is the most astonishing conversation. How it could ever feature in an encyclopaedia is mind-boggling. If people are so illiterate that they do not know what i.e. and e.g. are, then link them to articles in the same way footnote citations are linked. Even tabloids use both of them. Are we seriously suggesting that people are so illiterate that we should aim for a sub-tabloid standard of English? Or has the education system in the US really sunk to such a level of ignorance of basic language? Even if it has, English speakers on the rest of the language still use NB, e.g., i.e., etc. As Wikipedia policy has made clear, US standards of English do not set the standards of Wikipedia contributions. British-English, English-English, Hiberno-English and the many other forms of English, all of which still use i.e., e.g. et al are perfectly valid on Wikipedia and will continue to be used on Wikipedia. FearÉIREANN\(caint) 00:49, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

I do not see how using plain English phrases such as "for example" is "dumbing down" Wikipedia. It is simply using the more commonly known expressions. And just because the U.S. does not use latin abbreviations does not mean we are ignoramuses. I suppose you think we spell things differently out of sheer stupidity as well. You should appreciate that cultural differences do not necessarily equal inferiority. Kaldari 01:01, 20 January 2006 (UTC)
I think what we're seeing here is yet another collision between American English and Commonwealth English. E.g. and i.e. are rarely used in American newspapers and periodicals, but are common in formal academic journals and legal documents written by lawyers and judges. It sounds like as if Commonwealth English is using e.g. and i.e. in what Americans would consider to be informal contexts.
There may also be a collision going on between the early onset of the American Plain English movement and its delayed spread to the rest of the English-speaking world. --Coolcaesar 01:23, 20 January 2006 (UTC)
I do not contest that ignorance of the exact mechanics of a construction are unnecessary for reading comprehension, or that most readers are at least vaguely familiar with i.e. and e.g.. I don't think these abbreviations should be prohibited, but in the many situations where plain English is applicable, it's often easier to read and less stilted. Latin abbreviations are also often a flag for long-winded or overly-complicated language. Additionally, many of our readers only read at an intermediate level of English, and avoiding advanced constructions can help them out (although that's more the mission of the Basic English Wikipedia). Deco 02:10, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

Just for reference, here are my estimations of the popularity of various latin abbreviations in the U.S.:

  • etc. - Very common and universally understood. Used more often than any equivalent phrases.
  • e.g., i.e. - Not common in popular media. Usually understood. Almost no one knows what they actually stand for. Other phrases or abbreviations are far more common.
  • et al. - Almost exclusively used in academic or legal contexts. Most Americans with college degrees probably understand what it means.
  • n.b., cf., q.v., viz. - Never used outside of academic or legal contexts. Few Americans, even among those with college degrees, are familiar with these abbreviations.

Kaldari 03:08, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

Sounds about right to me, with the notable exception that people with legal or medical degrees tend to be more familiar with Latin abbreviations than most. Deco 03:16, 20 January 2006 (UTC)
I agree that we should be more firmly against it, but I've already said this on my user page. It's not dumbing down; it's removing pointless archaisms. — Omegatron 04:05, 20 January 2006 (UTC)
I think you are probably not very familiar with the publishing world. "Archaisms" like "i.e.", "etc." and "e.g." are around because they convey well understood terminologies in a minimal amount of (print) space. I'm not sure conserving space is any real concern at Wikipedia (seems like it should be), but all sorts of abbreviations exist in print for the reason that space usually always eventually becomes a premium in information transfer. Your assessment that these are pointless simply rerflects a lack of knowledge of the subject. That these are latin abbreviations seems archaic, but latin occupies a rather special place in the world languages. I do agree with Kaldari's assessment of common understanding of these latin abbreviations, as most come from specific fields (like the biology, or library science, or literature). There is no doubt that, at the expense of creating a longer phrase, most could be replaced, but that does seem a shame and a bit dumbing down to me. But I'd agree with the guidelines that Kaldari seems to be suggesting. - Marshman 04:55, 20 January 2006 (UTC)
That's the other thing. Wikipedia isn't paper. These abbrevations were made for publications in which space is at a premium. With two million words per penny, conserving space isn't important at all. There's no reason to use dead language abbrevations when whole english words will convey the exact same meaning. — Omegatron 06:23, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

I use i.e. and e.g. all the time, but I don't much mind using that is and for example instead. I do somewhat worry about that is being misinterpreted, though. For example, "I often use neologisms (that is, words that have recently come into the lexicon) and then explain what they mean in a parenthetical." I could see that sentence getting changed by a well-meaning copyeditor to "I often use words that have recently come into the lexicon and then explain what they mean in a parenthetical.", where I think it would be less likely had I used i.e. instead. I.e., to me, has not only the denotation of "that is", but also the connotation of "i am intentionally defining something in-place at this point."

Is it safe to assume that etc. is still fair game? "A, B, and so on" sounds painfully informal to my ears. --TreyHarris 05:53, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

I'm a fan of "and so on", but even I occasionally use etc.. In your example, you might consider "defined as", "meaning", "in other words", or simply omitting the connector: "I often use neologisms (words that have recently come into the lexicon) and then explain what they mean in a parenthetical." The Simple English Wikipedia has made a common practice of the last of these. Deco 07:47, 20 January 2006 (UTC)
In my experience with Wikipedia articles, Latin abbreviations, especially "etc.", are a sort of linguistic shortcut that more often than not are a manisfetation of muddled thinking on the part of the writer. I find that most of the time I encounter abbreviations like "etc.", and "i.e.", they are red flags that indicate that the entire paragraph needs to be carefully looked at to make sure it is sensical. I think that encouraging editors to write sentences that would sound equally fluid when read aloud—and Latin abbreviations never sound fluid when read aloud—would be an excellent way to generally improve the writing quality of articles. The argument that the abbreviations are shorter than their English equivalents is completely inapplicable on Wikipedia because Wikipedia Is Not Paper. So basically they amount to little more than phrases that are understood by a smaller group of people than that the group that can understand the equivalent English translations. As such, I don't see that they serve any purpose other than to reduce the clarity and therefore the accessibility of the articles they are used in. However, whenever this is pointed out, the response is that we shouldn't "dumb down" articles—a response which completely misunderstands the concept of clarity. Being clear does not mean simplifying or "dumbing down" ideas. Being "clear" just means expressing ideas in a way that is not muddled by unnecessary ellipsis, fancy vocabulary, and foreign phrases, including those hidden behind abbreviations. It seems no amount of appealing to the fact that articles are invariably better when Latin abbreviations have been removed is sufficient to dissuade editors from using them. So the Manual of Style doesn't recommend against them (although it should), but whenever I edit text that contains them, I always recast the sentences so as to exclude them, and I encourage everyone else to do likewise. Nohat 07:55, 20 January 2006 (UTC)
No offense, but virtually every use of X is a sort of linguistic shortcut that is a manifestation of muddled thinking is a defense used for almost every linguistic prescriptivism; just replace X with "split infinitive", "singular they", "passive voice", "dangling preposition", or any other grammatical bugaboo. Provide some URLs to sample diffs, please, showing where you corrected "muddled thinking" by eliminating etc. or i.e.? (Sorry to be so blunt, but I'm a linguist by training and I don't believe anything said about language without data.  :-) --TreyHarris 18:11, 20 January 2006 (UTC)
Right on. I have no problem with avoiding latinized abbreviations in favor of "clearer" sentenence structure, but do not buy the argument that what most regard as "clearer" writing (avoiding all that "difficult" vocabulary) is not a form of dumbing the language. Sure, in many cases, too many flowery statements obscures; but in many other cases avoiding certain words because they sound high-brow misses a clarity that people with poor vocabularies do not have. We should not make simplyfying the language a major goal here - Marshman 18:20, 20 January 2006 (UTC)
I consider "etc." to be an exception as "et cetera" has become a normalized English phrase. Of all the latin phrases we use abbreviations for, it is the only one to be used in spoken English, and quite commonly in fact. Kaldari 16:34, 23 January 2006 (UTC)
Not "only"—I speak and hear "i.e." and "e.g." with some frequency, though certainly not as often as "etc." Of course, unlike "et cetera", people say "eye ee" and "ee gee", not "id est" and "exempli gratia". --TreyHarris 16:41, 23 January 2006 (UTC)
And this is where the nail meets the head: "i.e." and "e.g." are English words, and they mean "that is" and "for example". Yes, they do have an etymological history as Latin abbreviations, but they are almost certainly not "foreign words" - e.g., in particular, seems to be replacing "for example" in both speech and print because it is shorter to say. Scott Ritchie 09:39, 30 January 2006 (UTC)
I agree with the latest comments. I use i.e. and e.g. quite often, and they are indeed part of the English language, like it or not. I appreciate that one shouldn't use them ad nauseam, but that applies to any word/phrase/expression. PizzaMargherita 14:59, 30 January 2006 (UTC)

They aren't part of the English language. Not even as loanwords like "bonus" or "virus". The vast majority of people do not "speak and hear" these abbreviations as words. The vast majority of people do not use them in normal conversation, or even in highly technical or specialized conversation.

Even if they were English words, would you advocate using "callipygian", "defenestrated", and "molendinaceous" in articles where their written-out English equivalents could be used with no loss of information or connotation? They're part of the English language, too.

Articles in Wikipedia should be accessible to the widest possible audience. For most articles, this means accessible to a general audience.

See Make technical articles accessible, meta:Reading level — Omegatron 16:07, 30 January 2006 (UTC)

Don't you mean:
Even if they were English words, would you support using "callipygian", "defenestrated", and "molendinaceous" in articles where their written-out English twin could be used with no loss of facts or hidden meanings? They're part of English, too.
Articles in Wikipedia should be easy to understand for the biggest possible audience. For most articles, this means easy to understand for a general audience.
See Make hard articles easy to understand, meta:Reading level
C'mon. The idea that a word, just because it's a cognate with Latin, is therefore harder to understand is condescending. Oops, I mean just because it's a sound-alike with Latin, saying it's harder to understand is a put-down. --TreyHarris 18:26, 30 January 2006 (UTC)

Both m-w and Cambridge report e.g. and i.e. on par with virus, so I'd say they are part of the English language, unless you can provide references that state otherwise. No, I would not advocate using the words you mention, but we do not have a separate list for them, do we? So for the same reason, even if i.e. and e.g. should be black-listed (which I moderately disagree with), that should not be done explicitly. PizzaMargherita 17:12, 30 January 2006 (UTC)

First, I think the goal is to make articles well-written, readable and easy to understand. I don't think there's any point making a special issue of Latin. Use/avoidance of Latin-derived words and abbreviations is not all that strongly correlated with ease of understanding. "A sheaf of germs" isn't any easier to understand than "a canonical symplectic 2-form." They're both highly technical terms and I don't personally have a clue as to what either of them means.

Second, the writing style ought to vary within an article. Introductions should be comprehensible to a very wide audience. As one proceeds deeper into more technical sections, the writing should become more technical. Dpbsmith (talk) 18:46, 30 January 2006 (UTC)

Ahh, here we go again. Long discussions keep coming up on this subject. They boil down to "We LIKE the abbreviations" vs. "We don't." As a person with a master's degree in journalism and 10 years as a technical writer, I'll give my 2 cents: Use plain English. The style guide should say to avoid all latin abbreviations (i.e., e.g., etc.) because they serve no useful purpose in the context of this encyclopedia, many people don't understand them, and they represent lazy or academic-toned writing. They are always avoidable, at no cost in time, space, or meaning, and IMO they hamper readability.

Often, there's no need to include either "e.g." or "for example" if punctuation is used correctly:

Several states (including Florida, Illinois, and California) have state capitals located far from their major cities.
Compare that to:
Several states, e.g. Florida, Illinois, and California, have state capitals located far from their major cities.
"i.e." in particular, seems like just an affectation, a tic, or a feeble signifyer of "serious content."
There are almost no arguments I consider valid for encouraging use of these abbreviations, so the argument always comes down to whether (or how strongly) the MOS should discourage their use. To me, it's one of the basic rules for clear, common, non-fussy, readable articles: Don't use latin abbreviations, especially i.e., e.g., n.b., and etc. I know others disagree, but I'm forced by my deepest copyeditor instincts to remove them from articles I work on. DavidH 17:55, 17 March 2006 (UTC)
Writing as one who uses British-English natively, I strongly prefer the use of abbreviations such as i.e and e.g. as they serve the purpose of flagging that the text which follows their use is separate to the previously expressed idea. I find so-called 'plain English' more tiring to read than text that makes proper use of Latin abbreviations, or even unabbreviated Latin expressions, such as vide supra and sic. By the way, the logic in the previous comment appears suspect - "...almost no arguments I consider valid..." means there must be arguments you do consider valid. It therefore does not follow that the MoS should discourage their (abbreviations) use. As a matter of interest, what arguments do you consider valid? WLD 13:50, 29 March 2006 (UTC)
I've been bold, and updated the MoS with what I hope to be a less inflammatory policy which encourages people to use equivalent English expressions, but does not give carte blanche to prescriptionists. No doubt, if this is too contentious, it will be reverted. WLD 14:11, 29 March 2006 (UTC)

What is the equivalent of sic, by the way? With AWB and bots getting more and more common, I've been finding it necessary to mark "[sic]" much more often than in the past, lest some automated process that knows nothing about the subject at hand "fix" a spelling that isn't broken. --TreyHarris 17:23, 29 March 2006 (UTC)

My Langenscheidt dictionary translates it as "so, thus, in this manner, in this case, on this condition". I have always understood it to mean "thus" when used in text to indicate that what is written is not mistaken, but an accurate transcription of an original text. That being said, I have never seen people using thus in its place. WLD 18:18, 29 March 2006 (UTC)
Oh, I know what it literally translates as. But earlier several people alleged that there was no case when you needed to use Latin in the body text of the Wikipedia. So I'm asking them what they would use instead of sic. "(intentionally misspelt)" or "(this is correct)" or "<!-- don't change! -->" are all pretty ghastly. --TreyHarris 18:29, 29 March 2006 (UTC)
Ah. Sorry, I see your point, and I too would like to know what the prescribed English equivalent would be. WLD 18:36, 29 March 2006 (UTC)
Q.E.D. is replaced by a "tombstone" (a solid black square) - perhaps there is a symbol for sic? WLD 18:43, 29 March 2006 (UTC)
We actually have an article on these: List of Latin abbreviations. Rmhermen 19:15, 29 March 2006 (UTC)
I don't understand. Sic is not an abbreviation, and isn't even discussed in that article. What are you referring to? --TreyHarris 19:20, 29 March 2006 (UTC)
If one is meant to eschew the use of Latin and Latin abbreviations, the question arises as to what they should be replaced with. sic does not appear to have an elegant replacement.

On a general point, if Latin abbreviations are deprecated, then plain English substitutions will need to be found for a.m. and p.m., MO, PS, and lb. If, on the other hand, it is argued that these could or should be kept, the question will then arise as to what the substantive difference is between the use of a.m and i.e., for example. WLD 08:01, 30 March 2006 (UTC)

At the risk of feeding a troll here, I would offer that the substantive difference between a.m. and i.e. is that even an 8-year-old will know what a.m. means but have no idea what i.e. means. I'm not saying that we need to write for a second grade audience, but that is the substantive difference. And it is substantial. Nohat 08:45, 30 March 2006 (UTC)

I do not concur. Western civilization belongs to a long tradition, of which Latin and Greek have played largely. The purging of language parallels a purging of tradition. This is not unrelated to why Athens and Rome mean so little to anyone today, but SQL or the Stanley Cup mean so much.


Bulleted items

Do bulleted items have to have periods to end them? Some bulleted items are sentence fragments and don't look proper with a period to end them such as:

  • 1997.
  • Academy Award.

Should the rule be that if it is more than one sentence then it should get a period? Such as:

  • Academy Award and Golden Globe (fragment with no period)
  • He won the Academy Award that year. He also won the Golden Globe. (full sentence with period)

What do you think? How do other style guides handle them? --Richard Arthur Norton (1958- ) 05:29, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

No periods always seems to work best, since they are not sentences. It's also probably best not to mix bulleted points with and without periods; so rewrite the last one, or just use a period in the middle but not at the end. Bulleted points are best if they're brief; if you need too much punctuation, consider rewriting the list as a paragraph or removing some information to the text or footnotes. —Michael Z. 2006-01-20 18:39 Z
  • In some cases, including discussion on talk pages, a bulleted list where each entry is a paragraph works well. When most items in a list are naturaly short, making some into sentances is probably a poor idea. DES (talk) 18:45, 20 January 2006 (UTC)
In some cases bulleted lists have all but the last ending in a comma or semicolon, and the last ending in a period. But more conventionally I either see all periods or no periods, based on whether or not the items are complete sentences. Deco 22:52, 20 January 2006 (UTC)
  • Hi. I hope you don't mind my grabbing a bullet and jumping in here. My question is also about bullets but, in a way, is sort of the question directly after the one you address: what else can you lose after you lose that period, comma or semicolon? I think I'd already conceded to myself that punctuation may as well be dropped from the end of each bullet. I might have asked this page about it myself if I hadn't also begun running into bigger questions about how to field sentence structures in bulleted lists (Talk:Ignacio_Zuloaga). I started to break down my sentences for "bullet-ization" and became concerned about how much might be too much--then stopped to reassess. There came a level where what was just bearable in a paragraph ("He does this ... He does that ...") becomes a string of personal pronouns all in a vertical line--and then its obvious that they have got to go. So then you have a bunch of verb-object/(prepositional-phrase) constructs. Would it be accurate enough to just say that a bulleted item need be no more than a cogent phrase (or even one word, say "birth"?) adequately describing some event, and that this criterion trumps other conventional structures? I feel like I could draw the line somewhere this side of the pale, but I want a better idea of where the bounds/conventions are. Do any style manuals address this? I have a couple of lesser ones that don't mention it. -cheers,  EN1-UTE- (Talk) 23:22, 29 April 2024 UTC [refresh] </nowiki> -->Onceler (Talk) (Mail)   09:42, 24 January 2006
PS: (Another posting on this page reminds me to ask: where does that old proscription of "no sentence fragments" fit in here? -Onceler 10:20, 24 January 2006 (UTC)
I just saw the new W:MOS bullets section. I guess it clears up my concerns in in as much as degree of fragmentation is not the right question. It's more important to be consistent one way or the other, whether by bits or bytes. -thanks, Onceler 12:02, 24 January 2006 (UTC)
  • I propose a change to recommending punctuation at the end of all bullet points regardless of sentence completeness on the grounds of accessibility. Many screen readers that I have tested only see the rendered text, not the underlying structural markup, and are therefore dependent on punctuation to set phrasing. In these, unpunctuated lists end up run together as a single nonsensical sentence. More expensive products such as Jaws may not behave this way, but not everyone in need of assistive technology can afford commercial products. dramatic 07:16, 16 March 2006 (UTC)

Removed paragaph on date linking

I just removed the following paragraph "In a biography, for example, Wikipedia only requires that the birth date and year and death date and year be wikified in biographies. Ask yourself: will clicking on the year bring any useful information to the reader?" The first sentace is not correct -- there is no current guideline (mich less a policy) which requires such links -- it is in fact much disputed whether they should even be standard, and until recently the MOS dates & numbers page pretty celarly reccomended agaisnt them. I myself tend to remove them whenever I find them. DES (talk) 22:53, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

Odd, though I didn't write that text. I would have thought that most biographies would include day, month, and year, in which case the MoS is pretty clear that you wikilink. Otherwise user preferences for date formats do not work. So you're referring only to cases where the day of birth or death are not known, only the year? --TreyHarris 22:58, 20 January 2006 (UTC)
Yes i am refering to cases where the only date given in the lead is the year, which is not at all uncommon for birthdates, particualarly for people born a long time ago. (Prefs also do not work if the month and year, but no day, is given, which is less common but does happen.) There is an ongoing debate about this on the talk page of the relevant MoS page -- see that for more details. DES (talk) 23:07, 20 January 2006 (UTC)
I am confused. Here is the entry: [[1]]

I was saying that biographies require the birth and death dates wikified. I was trying to convey that there is no need to wikify every year you see in an article. Such as:

He moved to Jersey City in 1928, then in 1930 his parents moved to Hoboken. By 1935 he was working as a lawyer, and he married in June of 1941. In 1942 he enlisted in the Navy, where he won the Navy Cross.

I ask: will clicking on the link be useful, or is part of the wiki-clutter? --Richard Arthur Norton (1958- ) 23:25, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

There is a poll now ongoing on the talk page about whether those examples should remain linked, since the paragraph above says that years not part of full dates generally should not be linked. The examples show biography lead dates as being linked, but nothing in the text says that such links are required (asming that no full date is present) DES (talk) 23:29, 20 January 2006 (UTC)
See Wikipedia:Manual of Style (dates and numbers)#Usage of links for date preferences. See also Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style (dates and numbers)#Year links in examples (year of birth/death) and subsequent discussion. DES (talk) 23:31, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

Spelling proposal

Consensus has led to the following widely accepted "rule":

"Articles that focus on a topic specific to a particular English-speaking country should generally conform to the spelling of that country."

But what about "neutral" articles, articles that are not related to any English-speaking country, like dream or fish?
I think we need a simple rule for these articles. What do you think about the following proposal?

Generally, articles should use Oxford spelling (see OED, section "Spelling"). Oxford spelling is based on British conventions, but it deviates from common practice in several ways: The most important difference from usual British spelling is the use of -ize instead of -ise. At first glance, one might think: "It's basically British spelling with -ize". However, the -ize-suffixes are very common. In fact, they are the most common spelling variations in academic texts. Oxford spelling is used by the majority of international organizations, because it is often considered the best compromise. Many will now think: this approach favours British spelling too much, and they are right. That's why I propose the following "counterweight": All neutral articles with titles that have multiple spelling should conform to Webster's preferred spelling: color, honor, defense... It think that would be a fair approach and would give a clear answer to the question what kind of spelling should be used for any given article:

- Related to any English-speaking country? -> That country's spelling. Example: United States
- Neutral and title with variant spelling -> US spelling. Example: Honor
- Neutral and title without variant spelling -> Oxford spelling. Example: Dream

NeutralLang 23:42, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

  • An intersting idea, but I oppose this. It is just asking for too many edit wars if we try to prescribe a particular set of speeligns from among valid regonal alternatives. DES (talk) 23:58, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

But what about "neutral" articles, articles that are not related to any English-speaking country, like dream or fish?

Original contributor rule. — Omegatron 20:37, 29 January 2006 (UTC)
Oppose: An interesting idea, yes, but why would the following not be just as acceptable?
- Related to any English-speaking country? -> That country's spelling. Example: United States
- Neutral and title with variant spelling -> Oxford spelling. Example: Metre
- Neutral and title without variant spelling -> US spelling. Example: Blue
I don't quite see the rational behind it and, as DES suggests, it would be asking for trouble. Jimp 16:59, 19 February 2006 (UTC)
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