User talk:Thromordyn

Cultural Spelling Prejudices

This wiki does not favour/favor one culture's spelling over another. So please stop doing so. Game terms are arguably American-centered, but I'm not sure that the term "labour/labor" is found anywhere in the game itself. The policy is to allow "first come, first served" on any given article, and not pretend that one spelling is "right" where the other is wrong, nor that one serves a larger majority of Users better, and so certainly not to slavishly edit every reference according to the article title. Appreciate the effort, but you can stop now, thanks.--Albedo 02:54, 23 February 2010 (UTC)

Actually, the game does use the term "labor" rather than "labour", at least according to the string dump... --Quietust 03:11, 23 February 2010 (UTC)

Okay, thanks, wasn't sure about that, but even then, referring to that string dump is different than talking about a "labouring dwarf". Users need to accept that "flavour/flavor", "colorful/colourful" and "favorite/favourite" are cultural prejudices, nothing more, and one is not "right" or "wrong", nor can it be. This is not an American site, not a British site - the site's international - it's called the World-Wide-Web for a reason. Consistency within an article regarding that article's name is fine, but not a personal pogram against one spelling or the other.--Albedo 03:46, 23 February 2010 (UTC)

One question. Why the attack? Consistency causes no harm, and it makes searching much easier if we can agree on one simple, logical spelling. (I have nothing against the English English (as opposed to American English) way of adding an unnecessary "u" or French with its strings of not-pronounced letters. I just figure that logic stands above tradition.) But, of course, I'm putting this up for humans to read. No common sense, no general ability to come to a group realization of reason. Or rather, minimal general ability. It's very rare, but not nonexistent.

Again, consistency causes no harm.

It does bother me that the pages I fixed for consistency have been reverted, but I'm not stupid enough to fight the sysadmin or anyone similar. All it'll get is a banning for me and a sense of superiority for the people with special privileges. I'll not go on a rampage of logic again, outside mercilessly correcting bad grammar when I stumble across it.

-- Thromordyn ~7:48, 24 February 2010 (GMT-5)

Although there is a good argument for picking one set of spelling guidelines throughout the wiki, lets try to think this through all the way. The logical next step is to decide which consistent set of spellings to use throughout the wiki. The most prevalent alternatives are american english and english english, but your options don't stop there: there are almost as many choices for this as there are english-speaking countries. So which one do we use? Well, the one we could build the strongest argument to support is probably american english. So far, I think my reasoning probably matches yours.

Now that we've decided on one possible course of action, let's examine what would happen if we decided to adopt american spelling throughout the wiki. Well, for american english speakers like you and me, we get a nice feel of consistency throughout the wiki and searching becomes more intuitive, just like you said. But non-american english speakers get alienated and pissed off as their (clearly superior) dialect gets brushed aside and replaced left and right. It's very easy to call these emotions irrational when it isn't your language and culture being attacked this way.

So if we don't like these consequences, what other course of action can we take? How can we get any semblance of consistency and sense into the wiki if people can just use any spelling willy-nilly? Well, I don't think there is a good way to do this while avoiding the problem above, but up until now the guideline on the wiki has been borrowed from wikipedia.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style#National_varieties_of_English

I hope that makes some sense out of the situation here. Also, please don't think of what was done as an attack on your edits, but rather a defense of other cultures. VengefulDonut 01:24, 25 February 2010 (UTC)

Admittedly, that was something of an ad-hoc decision a few people agreed to a long time ago, and hasn't really been discussed by most of the current editors. If you can think of a good argument about this topic, we might find majority opinion is on your side. Who knows unless you try, eh? VengefulDonut 01:29, 25 February 2010 (UTC)