General Discussion

Ninelevendo said:
What's the current reasoning on the guideline on which form of English to use? From my knowledge the wiki allows both forms, and I've been thinking, if the wiki uses the American names of games as standard, why not normal sentences? While some users will out of habit write the Brittish version of English(myself included), having American English as a standard will keep consistency throughout the wiki, I've seen articles say "color" in one sentence and "colour" in the next, and it looks unprofessional. Is this too much of a minor issue to bother changing?
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This is something I've thought about too. I support standardizing to American English in articles for the same reasons we standardize to American game titles, and for consistency across the wiki.

Traffic is majority American, so most of the wiki is already this way. A user who adds new text with a different spelling hasn't done anything wrong, but if someone changes it to American spelling, there's no reason to change it back after that.
 
I heavily support what Porplemontage just said. The Warning Policy and the Manual of Style should be updated accordingly.
 
Brought up this argument before, so it's pretty clear what my stance was. "First come first served" wasn't a really satisfying response, but I suppose it served to prevent conflicts between British/American spellings, but it had problems of its own.
 
Canceled is the American way of spelling cancelled?

I agree with what porple said. If someone writes Brittish spelling, that's likely because that's the only way that they've ever spelt, so it's not like they are deliberately disobeying wiki standards, just as with someone who doesn't have very good grammar.

If we standardise American spelling, should we change every instance of Brittish spelling to American on sight or should we just disallow changing of American spelling into Brittish spelling? Personally I'm with the first option, as this allows for more consistency whenever possible.

Would this warrant a proposal, any major changes, etc.?
 
This probably does warrant a proposal rather than forum consensus, as it's a pretty major change to the wiki.

If we standardize American spelling, then yes, every instance of British spelling aside from British bios, British quotes, and British names should be changed on site. That's what standardizing means.
 
I feel good about this and if the proposal didn't pass I would force it to pass, so it's not that necessary. ;)

If someone wants to go around and update spelling to American, they can. But basically, the rule needs to be that the only allowed spelling change is from British to American. This protects people who add British text and don't know any better, but if a word gets updated to American, it's only against the rule to change it back. Then everything trends toward that consistent spelling goal.
 
Yep, a failed proposal can be veto'd by an admin decision anyway. We'll skip that middle-man, and the relavant policy pages will soon be updated.
 
I wouldn't use bots tbh. What if the bot changed a quote from a bio? Those are one of the few exceptions to the rule.