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Comment by suivix | Hacker News Reader

I changed 'tyre' to 'tire' in an article and got a vandalism notice on my talk page. That's when I stopped contributing.

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DO NOT move Orange (colour) to Orange (color).

The problem with Wikipedia is rather than consistency they go with, "who got here first and what is a large majority of the article written in? (British?, American?). All the other pages on color all use American English but apparently someone using British English got to Orange first. It's a huge mess but I suppose it doesn't matter since no one types in disambiguated names.

The problem with Wikipedia is its a very large bureaucracy, and the culture of Wikipedia seems to weigh heavier on confirming from 3rd party sources that a person is "notable"

What's confusing is that Wikipedia also wants to "welcome" anonymous edits, which leads to huge problems with vandalism, but editing Wikipedia has a high learning curve.

>The problem with Wikipedia is rather than consistency they go with, "who got here first and what is a large majority of the article written in? (British?, American?). All the other pages on color all use American English but apparently someone using British English got to Orange first. It's a huge mess but I suppose it doesn't matter since no one types in disambiguated names.

That's a problem? That's exactly the policy I use with the legacy codebase I manage. If you're making a change to an existing file, you should make the changes according to the file's existing style, regardless of whether you agree with it or not. It prevents files from becoming impossible to read when different people edit it over a period of months, or even years. Wikipedia enforces this policy for the same reason. It's pointless and distracting to have an article that changes from tyre to tire every paragraph.

That's because 1) There is a policy against Americanizing British spellings for no reason (this is probably a good thing); 2) frequently experienced editors are much too harsh with new contributors and don't explain why (this is definitely a bad thing).

... which is completely ridiculous, for two reasons. One, Wikipedia is based in America, and so naturally its English should be consistently American. Two, modern English as spoken and written in England has grammar problems -- e.g., the insistence on using plurals for singular objects, such as corporations ("Shell Oil have announced ..."). Therefore, American English is obviously preferable.

The English uses plural for corporations because they are referring to the mass of entities that make up the corporation (including people, brands, products). I don't think this is a grammatical problem, but a societal/philosophical viewpoint on what a corporation is. If you are American, of course it seems weird, but within the context of English society, it is internally self consistent with English grammar.

Ah, the good old "The English have poor command of English" argument. Nice work.

The thing that really kills me about your comment is that you seem to think that your off-the-top-of-your-head points are somehow novel, as if no Wikipedian has ever mentioned them before.

And that's exactly the mistake Sullivan makes, too. You're both wrong, of course: discussions on these topics go back years, with hundreds or thousands of smart participants.

But at least you haven't done like Sullivan and a million others by following up your naiveté with outrage that you aren't being respected for your genius, insight, and expertise.

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