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Why did that section make you change your spelling, it supports the -a spelling. It says that "referendums" is a plurality of ballots whereas "referenda" is a plurality of issues. In the case of the template, we are talking about a plurality of issues. Given that the external source and the Wikipedia article both support the -a spelling I'm going to switch it back unless you can point to something in the MOS that supports the -ums spelling. —Arctic Gnome (talk • contribs) 20:52, 15 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]
The argument that its deprecated is demonstrably wrong; the -a spelling gets 3.5 million Google hits whereas the -ums spelling gets 4.1 million, less than a 20% difference. It also makes no sense to say that one spelling has replaced the other while also saying that the spellings have different meanings; if they mean different things, we should use the correct meaning regardless of how common that usage is. As for its use on other Wikipedia templates, MOS:TIES trumps consistency across articles, and the body that regulates referenda/referendums in this jurisdiction uses the -a spelling at a 5:1 ratio on its online publications. Elections Ontario uses the -a spelling at a 35:1 ratio, so that template should be changed too. Can you cite any Wikipedia policy that supports the -ums spelling other than a desire for cross-article consistency? —Arctic Gnome (talk • contribs) 21:13, 15 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]
You'll have to bring it to the attention of the OED then. MOS:TIES is irrelevant here, as it is about national varieties of English (e.g. flavour vs flavor), which is not the issue at hand (this is not a British vs Canadian English thing). Number5721:30, 15 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]
MOS:TIES is very relevant here. Apparently use of the -a spelling had depreciated in Oxford English, but in British Columbian and Ontarian professional English it is the most common spelling by a wide margin. —Arctic Gnome (talk • contribs) 21:43, 15 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]
But it's not a spelling issue related to national varieties of English. As you can see here, "referenda" is also used in the UK. The choice between the two words seems to be more of a linguistic issue around the specific meaning of the two alternatives, and it appears to me that Wikipedia has chosen one of the two versions for a specific reason (according to one editor here, referenda is "cod Latin"). This may be better discussed at WP:Elections and referendums. Number5710:29, 16 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]
It isn't really cod Latin if, as the quote you gave suggests, the two spellings have two different meanings. Even if we ignored the fact that the prevalence of spellings does change significantly between national varieties of English (which I don't think we should), the Oxford quote suggests that the -a spelling is the definition that we want in this case. —Arctic Gnome (talk • contribs) 03:14, 1 June 2012 (UTC)[reply]
It's cod Latin in the sense that the Latin doesn't really support the use of that spelling as the standard plural. In my experience hardly anybody uses both "referendums" and "referenda" to mean different things, and the exceptions are nearly always people who had previously used "referenda" as the plural in all circumstances who when it's pointed out that the Latin doesn't really support it then try to retain "referenda" in some form. In practice a single plural spelling is used and "referendums" is more logical because it doesn't try to take a Latin spelling and redefine it (and also because words in English should use English rules of pluralisation, regardless of their language of origin). Timrollpickering (talk) 18:07, 5 June 2012 (UTC)[reply]
What makes you say that Latin doesn't support the use of that spelling? Our Wiktionary entry for the word seems to support the -a spelling as the plurals in Latin, unless I'm missing something. As for English, I would argue that English rules for pluralization include more than the -s rule and the vowel-shifting rule. In some words, the -s spelling is significantly less common than the spelling in its original language (e.g., cactuses/cacti). The pluralization rules -us/-i and -um/-a are so well-integrated into English that they are often used and understood when the root language isn't Latin, such as with the technically incorrect but still somewhat common octopus/octopi. In the case of "referenda", I think that it's common enough (and correct enough) that we don't have to "correct" our references and subjects when they use it, like Elections BC does. —Arctic Gnome (talk • contribs) 18:57, 5 June 2012 (UTC)[reply]
