User:Chowbok/Thoughts on regional English differences
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Since this is the Wikipedia for all varieties of English, not just American, we have to deal with the issue of differences between regional English varieties. Mostly these are spelling differences (humor/humour, center/centre), but also occasionally differences in the definition of a word (football/soccer).
The current solution is a little weird. The rule is, basically: if the article is about an American/British/Canadian/Australian subject, then use the respective region's English spellings in case of a conflict. Otherwise, use whatever the article's creator happened to use originally.
This just seems like an arbitrary, cut-the-baby-in-half solution to me. Just picking a national variety and sticking with that would make more sense. But there's a better way.
Proposal[edit]
These are computers! We can do neat things that print can't do. How about if we implemented something like this:
{{regional|humor|humour}}
(where the first parameter is American and the second is British; we could have optional third and fourth parameters for Canadian and Australian, which would default to British if unspecified)
Then MediaWiki could parse the template and give the viewer the correct version depending on the preferred language set in user preferences (or the "Accept-language" header).
I think this could be done with the installation of the LanguageSelector and Multilang MediaWiki extensions.