User talk:DarkTigerLord

English spelling

Please do not unilaterally change the spelling of certain words that are different in British and American English, without (a) explaining your reasoning in the edit summary, and (b) gaining consensus on the article's talk page. For future reference, Wikipedia:Manual of style contains guidelines about English language usage in articles. Thank you. ~Amatulić (talk) 22:52, 10 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Fair enough I will leave all other articles that are about that country and so use there spelling of English, but all other articles foreign (Non-English-Speaking Countries) or British, I feel that I should be able to change them to British English as they do not have their own version of English so should use the original English. Please answer, in the mean time I will not change any Non-British articles. Thank You. DarkTigerLord

Thank you for your consideration.

While I agree that articles about predominantly British subjects should use British English, Wikipedia guidelines advise against unilaterally changing the spelling in articles about international subjects. Wikipedia:Manual of style#Consistency states: "It is inappropriate for an editor to change an article from one guideline-defined style to another unless there is a substantial reason to do so ... defer to the style used by the first major contributor." That is, if an article has had a long history of stability in one language style, that style should be retained. Wikipedia:Manual of style#National varieties of English has several subsections about this topic.

There are many variants of English, not just British and American. Wikipedia:Manual of style (spelling) lists them. The guidelines recommend against you changing "all other articles" (as you say) to British English. You should respect the language established in each article. Any clearly British article, on the other hand, should use British English, according to the guidelines.

I won't slap a boilerplate template warning on your talk page, but I will refer you to it; see Template:Uw-lang. The purpose of that template is to advise editors to retain the form of English the original author used in articles related to English-speaking countries other than the U.K. or U.S. ~Amatulić (talk) 18:09, 12 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]