Wikipedia talk:Articles using American English titles

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What is the policy regarding the use of American English as opposed to standard British english (if that's what you call it!) and Hiberno-English? In writing articles, I have generally followed the policy of leaving articles in whichever form of english they are written in; eg, the article on abortion refers to a fetus, which outside America is usually written as foetus. When I added info to the article, I used fetus with a footnote at the end pointing out the alternative spelling (just to reassure friends of mine I hadn't mis-spelt the word: many view American spelling as just bad spelling!!!) but was accepting the article standard. But where I write an article myself I use Hiberno-English. I have noticed some Americans have attempted to 'americanise' other versions of english, a rather sore point with some europeans; I have noticed a few have reverted to the english-english version and left some rather sharp notes to the effect of 'keep your bad spelling to yourself!' JTD 19:00 Feb 11, 2003 (UTC)

The policy has always been that Wikipedia has no preference among the major national varieties of English, but that it is good form to keep usage consistent within a given article. That said, remember that Americans tend to be less familiar with non-American usage than vice-versa (the net flow of media being in the outwards direction), and sometimes American contributors will unknowingly replace what they think is a spelling error (eg, "artefact"). When this happens, please point it out in the talk page, and make sure that the remainder of the article is consistent one way or the other. --Brion 19:04 Feb 11, 2003 (UTC)

Yeah, that is what I presumed and have been acting on. Is this policy formally written somewhere? (I glanced around and could not see it.) It is simply that it would be help in case a dispute arose to be able to point to it so as to end a row, rather than having people disputing whether there is such a policy and then have to get someone to confirm to the people in the row (often newbies) that there is such a rule. I know I have been trying to clarify and catalogue other rules to diffuse disputes before they blow up, eg the issue of royal nomenclatures, for which I have done a lot of work. JTD 19:20 Feb 11, 2003 (UTC)

I was fairrly sure it was written down somewhere... it might be in terms of general spelling, and thus be taken to spill over into naming of articles. Do we really need this page anyway? Whenever there are alternative names for something, we usually create redirects, and the article itself should give alternative names, so there's no problem finding it. -- Tarquin 19:28 Feb 11, 2003 (UTC)

This is a de facto standard and although not inscribed in stone is considered good Wikipedia etiquette. We could theoretically cast it in stone, but it is in my view far more sensible and indicative of the spirit of international bonhomie that common sense is allowed to prevail. For example, the spelling of Anglicization is manifestly a nonsense in that the US spelling runs entirely antithetical to the semantics. As a contrary example, in an article on the States, the spelling of center (anathema though it may be to me!) should be allowed to prevail, and generally the consistency stipulation should determine the orthographic standard in any given article. user:sjc

fair point. But just occasionally common sense breaks down. Those of us who are around a while know these rules or pick them up but it is all too easy for someone who is new to come along, see 'foetus', 'centre', theatre' etc, decide they are wrong, and waste their time 'correcting' them, in the process annoying those who wrote the articles with those spellings. (I had one experience of this myself, someone insisting 'theater' is the correct spelling, and use as their justification this is after all America!!! (I resisted the temptation to point out that I was in Dublin and the three other people who worked on that article were in Britain.) It would have been useful to have been able to say - because there are spelling variations between different english-speakers, we agreed on how to approach this problem. Look up the 'Spelling Variations' page or whatever. (Recently a new guy wrote a very good article on royalty but used a surname in the article title. I congratulated him on the article but pointed out that, because of the complexity of royal names, we had agreed a structure to follow. He checked it out, came back to say 'oh I see what you mean. I can see the sense of that'. He then redid his excellent piece to follow the style and said he now knew the style to follow in the future. There was no disagreement, no row, no edit war. It couldn't have been easier or more straight-forward, unlike the other person who threw a tantrum saying 'what rule? I don't see any rule' and went off changing articles all over the place to 'americanise' them, annoying a host of non-american users who reverted his or her changes, leading him or her to re-americanise them, creating bad feeling all around. JTD 20:13 Feb 11, 2003 (UTC)

This goes with the wiki territory. The obverse side of the coin is that there are many more sensible users than fanatics. In my experience the preponderance of the American users in my view (despite their notorious tendency to cultural ethnocentricity :-) ) are pretty fair-minded and respect the nuances of Wikipedia etiquette and understand that it cuts both ways. user:sjc

I couldn't agree more, sjc. There are a hell of a lot of good people here, and quite a few bloody brilliant ones. The point I was making was simply that where you come to a stand-off with someone (who often is simply misguided), it is handy to diffuse any problem by saying 'yeah. We had this issue and reached a consensus on how to solve it' and say 'look at page 'x' than try to get into a long long debate, followed by contacting Cam or Mav or Deb or whomever for independent confirmation. We only disagree slightly about the methodology of how to let people know of the rule but 9 times out of 10 we don't need to get that far, particularly when as I am finding with the names convention changes I proposed, a lot of people check for the guidelines before doing any work, meaning that no problem even arises. (Indeed I am quite chuffed at how well that new consensus rule on royal names is now working. Quite a few new pages on royals have been put on, all following the one standard and style, with everyone so far finding it has made the task of contributors, writers, editors, etc dead easy and with no disputes whatsoever. JTD 20:42 Feb 11, 2003 (UTC)

I have attempted to codify the unofficial policy and make it official on Wikipedia:Manual of Style. Daniel Quinlan 23:37, Oct 29, 2003 (UTC)