Board Thread:Wiki Discussion/@comment-5956954-20160209104236/@comment-27701762-20160517213617

Maybe this is viewed as settled, but since there is still some area for disagreement and suggestion...

I think it useful to begin with the basic problem that most languages, and perhaps especially English, resist almost all attempts at standardization. That said, it is useful in many circumstances to try and impose some artificial sense of standardization for a variety of purposes.

In this case, it is useful for the sake of encyclopedic professionalism to try and impose some rules for the Wiki as a whole.

The process of deciding on spellings for words is a shifting process that never really took place until fairly recently in the history of the language, and the differences between "American English" and "British English" are not always "standard," but rather were introduced by particular people and attempted to be made standard, against its more common utilization. We could go further into the history, but it's not really that important. To take a brief example, though, caldron/cauldron isn't really put up as an example of such a distinction. "Caldron" has been used among some British authors, and "cauldron" appears to be generally accepted in American English as the standard spelling.

Moving to the case at hand, I propose the general set of rules:

1) The Wiki should use "American English" (i.e. color rather than colour; center rather than centre).

2) As an exception to the above, terms ending in "-ogue" (dialogue; epilogue) will use the "British English" variants. [This should apply to all terms, so even where American English tends to use "catalog" over "catalogue," the Wiki should use the latter. These discrepancies should occur rarely, if at all.]

3) Where the game "mixes up" the spelling, the original spelling in the game should be retained. [I imagine that there are only a couple of instances of this in the whole game, and perhaps the "spectre" usage may even be the only instance.]

Unless there are other issues, this set of rules should cover all of the bases and eliminate confusion, and provide a simple standard that can be applied to all pages equally.