Community Wishlist Survey 2022/Editing/Uniformity in spelling

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Uniformity in spelling

Problem: Some spellings have some variations, such as British English versus American English ("colour" versus "color"). This is prevalent in nearly all the languages. Some pages use some variant, while in other pages, the words are spelled differently.
Proposed solution: The editor should get a warning about the most prevalent spelling and the editor could mark "this is also spelled as......"
Who would benefit: All the stakeholders, i.e. readers, editors
More comments:
Phabricator tickets:
Proposer: Anupamdutta73 (talk) 10:11, 12 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Discussion

Seems related to phab:T265163. — xaosflux ^Talk 15:18, 14 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

This is already implemented as template in English Wikipedia. In Chinese Wikipedia due to the adoption of Language Converter this is a non-problem because the converter would automatically convert different words/different spellings/etc into user-selected variant. C933103 (talk) 00:51, 16 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Even if I can guess it a bit, I really don't get to grasp the explanation of this proposal. Could you develop it a bit more? Because in Catalan, we have two official Academies and our Wikipedia style book allows to use both variants indistinctly for the first editor who creates the article. Then, other editors must respect the first variant used and keep consistent along the text. If you could provide some examples, it would be great. I assume you mean kind of reminding the 2nd editor that this article follows a specific variant and suggesting the changes for it? Xavier Dengra (MESSAGES) 13:45, 22 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Not OP but Chinese has variations of their writing system, due to historical issues and geographic span. For example, there is Traditional and Simplified Chinese. Simplified Chinese came out of Mainland China in the 1950s and isn't used by Taiwan & Taiwanese. Here's a sentence with the same meaning but visually different characters:

报告录下来了 (Simplified)
報告錄下來了 (Traditional)

Means exactly the same, "the speech has been tape-recorded".

Users of Chinese Wikipedia can switch back and forth between those two plus a few other standards (Hong Kong, Macao, etc) thanks to the Language Converter. Xn00bit (talk) 19:33, 28 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I do not see any reason for this to come to fruition. Uniformity in spelling provides little besides being easier on the eyes. Bristledidiot (talk) 18:56, 28 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I rather agree, my gut feeling is that there's not that many variations in British and American English spellings for one to be unrecognizable to the other. Xn00bit (talk) 19:36, 28 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Make things like British/American part of the user profile. Then show differently spelled words according to the profile. There is no reason for editors to worry about this. Lfstevens (talk) 06:44, 31 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Voting

Support Sulaiman Gwanki (talk) 19:45, 28 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Support JDspeeder1 (talk) 00:46, 29 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Support — SHEIKH (Talk) 13:02, 29 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Support Thingofme (talk) 14:47, 30 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose See [1] and [2] KingAntenor (talk) 06:14, 2 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Support Hampcky (talk) 15:35, 2 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose There are too many places (e.g., direct quotes, business names, poems...) where an automated tool would have to be overridden. Gary D Robson (talk) 22:46, 4 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Support Sir Proxima Centauri (talk) 08:16, 5 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose Ayumu Ozaki (talk) 07:07, 6 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose We should value: Linguistic plurality, diversity, inclusivity, Linguistic Flexibility, Freedom of Expression, Linguistic Richness, Creativity. User:afam1986 (talk) --Afam1986 (talk) 16:48, 9 February 2022 (UTC)07:07, 6 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose: undesirable feature, off-putting to newbies and time-wasting in the false positive case (which could arise in a huge number of ways). Requires lots of language-specific work by the Wishlist team, so not of wide scope. The English Wikipedia has no major issue with spelling conventions. — Bilorv (talk) 11:09, 6 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose This is something for EN wiki and not for Wikimedia to maintain the lists of variants, which is already done at [3]. Userscripts already assist in updating them according to the English variant of the page — DaxServer (t · c) 12:09, 6 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Support --Ciao • Bestoernesto • ✉ 18:26, 6 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Support InterstateFive (talk) 20:19, 6 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose --Ján Kepler (talk) 19:42, 9 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Support This sounds like it should be an optional gadget, but it could be a particularly useful one! Gaurav (talk) 06:09, 11 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Support Fatt-1 (talk) 09:18, 11 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose DSparrow14 (talk) 17:01, 11 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]