Should we encourage a standardisation of English spelling and grammar? This might help the articles to appear more professional and cohesive. I recommend using Standard English ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_English
), as I think it is the most widely used form of English today.
Whoops, accidentally posted this twice, and I don’t see a delete button… Would someone mind deleting it for me?
Harri
4
“Standard English” simply refers to the generally accepted standard form of English in a particular anglophone country. There isn’t one standard international form of English and there are many anglophone countries. Grammar and spelling are corrected where possible, yes, but as a site we accept all international English variants
What dictionary does wikiHow follow? American or British?
Neither. You write it in whichever form suits you, and you follow whichever form of English an article is written in when editing. See Harri’s link.
system
7
To give an example from Lewis’s post, if he wrote an article with the words “colour” and “memorisation”, you would grandfather it (meaning respecting the original spelling and leaving it) instead of changing it to “color” and “memorization” just because it’s “American English”. And then vice versa.
Marina
8
Here’s my little story… I used to not really know the difference between the two dictionaries all that well. When I saw articles using the British spellings, I would correct them. One day, I saw someone doing the same thing…Except they were correcting English spellings to British ones! I thought they were purposely creating mistakes and she thought mine were bad faith edits, too! All of a sudden, I was receiving bad contribution messages from her. Therefore, I sent them back to her when I saw her mistakes. Suddenly I realized how personal this whole thing had become. I was about to shoot her a message saying ‘sorry’ when I saw her location. She was from England! Suddenly it occurred to me that everything I’d been correcting was actually correct. Oops. I dunno how much this really contributes to the subject, I just had a flashback when I read all of this. And I completely agree that the standard wikiHow uses should stay in place. It’s working just fine and the situation I had with the other contributor rarely occurs.
Just my two cents, I think the current system of using whichever form of English the original author uses works well, has worked well for the past eight years, and should stay in place. Creating a standardized/standardised English for wikiHow would be unnecessarily cumbersome. Few would stick to it, and those who do stick to it but don’t normally use whatever spellings were chosen would have a harder time writing articles. Additionally, wikiHow has many regionally-related articles (on visiting particular cities, for example) which would seem stilted and a bit weird if they used locally-inappropriate spellings.
