[OSM-talk] SteveC should decide

[James Livingston]

On 03/10/2009, at 4:25 PM, Gervase Markham wrote:
> Wikipedia has much less need for consistency than we do (e.g. it  
> doesn't
> matter if one article is in American English and another in Australian
> English; articles are not machine-parsed) and yet they have all  
> sorts of
> mechanisms for ensuring it.


I believe those mechanisms are something along the lines of "if it's  
related to a particular country, use their spelling, if not whoever  
creates the article first". Which of course leads to articles like  
Orange_(colour) and Grey using the British spellings, and most other  
colour articles using the American spelling. As long as it's  
consistent within the article, they don't seem to mind.


I'm all for working groups, who have their own mailing list (reporting  
to the rest of us occasionally), and having regular meetings. Pick an  
arbitrary time in UTC and rotate between that, that+8 and that+16 for  
the meetings. I think having their own mailing lis is important -  
because anyone who just likes to argue, and doesn't actually care,  
hopefully won't bother subscribing.