up vote 6 down vote favorite

I recently noticed someone applied a minor edit to one of my answers that changes a word from British English to American English. I searched around a bit, and found similar questions on other SE meta sites. The first relates to asking questions, and the second to adding tags. I am just curious if UX SE has a "preferred language" for consistency?

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Revert! American English is obviously wrong. – Rahul♦ Jan 3 at 12:50
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Slippery slope. Next they'll want to change the date to dd/mm/yyyy ;) – Charles Wesley Jan 3 at 21:59
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Just like on Wikipedia, the post should stay in the English variant it was originally written in. Otherwise people are going to start writing bots to automatically change "color" to "colour", then counter-bots to do the opposite and we end up with a massive bot war on Stackexchange. – Laurent Jan 7 at 13:58
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Use British English. Americans can't spell, so they won't notice anyway. :) – JohnGB Jan 14 at 12:37

2 Answers

up vote 7 down vote accepted

There is no official version of English, aside from StackExchange being an English Language site.

It is possible that when questions / answers written in one country are edited by someone in another country their own browser spellchecker will highlight words as incorrectly spelt when infact they are just spelt according to the original posters language. Perhaps this is the situation here? (I don't know the actual post you are referring to to be able to confirm).

We wouldn't encourage editing posts just to change from US to UK (or vice-versa), and if a suggested edit came up for authorisation that only included such a change it should be rejected as 'Too Minor'.

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I would prefer new version to show through without credit to "minor" editor. – qarma Jan 15 at 18:37
up vote 2 down vote

I stumbled across an answer that seems to draw a clear distinction between body text (doesn't matter) and tag text (only American English). That came from the accepted answer. The most-upvoted answer says "it should not matter, so do not edit". It is from SE Meta though.

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Yeah, I agree with the conclusion there (the UI text is American english, so the tags may as well match it) but body text doesn't need such consistency. I'd only add that you should reject edits that only add/remove Britishisms/etc from a post as Too Minor – Ben Brocka♦ Jan 3 at 15:07
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Do you mean Americanisms? :P – slawrence10 Jan 3 at 16:55
+1: This answers the question about tag names. – Slipp D. Thompson Jan 14 at 9:46

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