Legacy:Guidelines On Spelling

English vs American spelling

We've settled on American spellings on Unreal Wiki, largely because these are the spellings found in Unreal Engine script comments and Epic's documentation.. So "color" rather than "colour", "modeling" with just one "l" and so on.

It's a good idea to make a redirect page for the English spelling.

Common mistakes

The apostrophe

Please pay attention to correct usage of the apostrophe. In particular, the word "it's" only stands for "it is" or "it has". See http://www.angryflower.com/ for helpful hints.

Words that don't exist

The following are not words:

• alot (you mean "a lot" or "allot")
• definately (you mean "definitely" - just think of "definition")

Discussion

Birelli: Whose spelling are we using? We're going to waste a lot of time if we spend it "correcting" other people's spelling to our own, because others will just change it back. There are genuine disagreements here, not just "mistakes". The most obvious of them (and the one that prompted this) is "color" vs. "colour", but there is also "center" vs. "centre" and tons more in the same vein as both of these.

Tarquin: I've previously said we can use both; Mych has suggested we use US spelling everywhere. I don't really mind that much, as long as people get apostrophes right ;)

Mychaeel: Adhering to a consistent way of spelling (at least in page titles) makes searching easier and avoids accidental mis-linking of pages and/or creation of page doubles (one American English version, one British English version; as in modeling/modelling). That's the pragmatic approach and the most striking argument here, I believe.

I'm neither British nor American (English lessons in school somewhat favored British English), but I've personally decided sometime that I'd try stick to the American English spelling of words – it's generally simpler (which appeals to the programmer in me), and most importantly it's far more widespread.

Foxpaw: I don't know which spellings belong to which, I generally just use whichever I feel like at the time. I usually use center and color, but words like armour or modelling I just use whichever spelling I like. Having said that, anyone is welcome to change the spelling on any page I've written to comply to a wiki standard if one is agreed upon.

Birelli: Being American it's obviously a lot easier for me to follow a US-english standard, but I know how hard it can be to constantly remind yourself to spell things in a way that feels wrong. Perhaps it would be best to say that the Wiki is using a US standard, but ignore differences if they're in text that doesn't affect technical things. Links kind of have to be stringently enforced though, as with the modeling/modelling example.

Mychaeel: If (when, I mean, of course) the new search engine outlined on Wiki Development becomes reality sometime in future, it might be possible to provide it with a list of British/American English word pairs to make it more liberal in terms of spelling; so a search for "colour" would also find pages containing only the word "color."

dUc0N: What about "disambiguation" pages like those on WikiPedia? The concept is a set of pages that offer links to documents you were probably looking for. For example, on WikiPedia, the 'Mercury' page would have links to the element, the planet, the car, the record label, the NASA manned spaceflight project and the Roman god. Another type of page like this could cover spelling differences. For example, use US spelling as the convention for the site, but for a page with Color in the title, add a page where it's spelled Colour, but redirects to the US spelling version. Thoughts?

Tarquin: redirects for alternate spellings are a good idea.

MythOpus: definately is spelt correctly :) Or at least thats how we spell it here in Canada... or I spell it....

Wormbo: Well, then you probably spell it incorrectly: http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=definately

MythOpus: Sigh. Well that just sucks. (Updating Brain-Dictionary)