User talk:BeeArkKey
I'm not quite sure what you are referring to with your reference to Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style#National_varieties_of_English. There's no mention of English used in Iceland there, and they consistently use metre rather than meter on that page. Before I changed it, I checked, and the references I saw noted that Icelandic leans towards standard European and British English spellings. As far as I know, the only country that uses the "meter" spelling is the one country that hasn't adopted the metre! But perhaps you know something I don't? Nfitz (talk) 01:30, 20 March 2021 (UTC)
- The guideline I had understood was to avoid edits solely to switch between American and British spellings. I didn't see any uses of metre/kilometre on the page when I added two uses of meter, so I just reverted them all. I'm in the US and you're right unfortunately it seems people here mostly tend to spell meter as "3 feet" (which isn't even accurate). BeeArkKey (talk) 01:49, 20 March 2021 (UTC)
- An odd guideline - if someone got it wrong we leave it wrong? Until your edit, the meter spelling was solely in the Volcanism of Iceland#Bárðarbunga 2014–2015 section which refers to the main article at 2014–2015 eruption of Bárðarbunga, which uses 'metre' 23 times and 'meter' only once (I should fix that, consistency trumps everything else!). As such, the article always should have had "metre" not "meter". Another issue is the article shouldn't use normal English elsewhere, and a local foreign variant in a different place. As it uses sulphur not sulfur, it should use metre to be consistent. Nfitz (talk) 18:28, 21 March 2021 (UTC)
- I totally agree that consistency within an article is the most important issue, and would also agree with fixing the Bárðarbunga article for that. The guideline exists exactly for cases like this, where somebody feels that one of the spellings is "wrong." I would argue the spelling used by 80% of the world's native English speakers is correct, but that's exactly the point of the guideline -- we should correct for consistency within an article, but because there is only one English-language Wikipedia and we don't all agree on spelling, it is not possible to "correct" these spellings across the entirety of Wikipedia. BeeArkKey (talk) 03:30, 22 March 2021 (UTC)
80% of the English speakers? I'm not sure how they spell English in India is relevant here. It's pretty clear that the other articles about volcanism in Iceland use normal English spellings, as do other words in this article. As you said, the articles should be consistent, and they should reflect regional (Icelandic) spellings in English. I'll fix it. Please don't revert. Nfitz (talk)
- Certainly no need to revert again after discussion. List_of_countries_by_English-speaking_population shows 78.95% of the world's native (first language) English speakers in the United States. BeeArkKey (talk) 19:51, 26 March 2021 (UTC)