Proposal for resolving language variations

[Moydow]

One of the longest-running debates among editors on several wikis is that of which dialect of English to use in an article. Differences like this are becoming even more apparent in games today; in many recent Nintendo games, for example, the two regions sometimes don't share in-game place names (The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks) or even game titles (Professor Layton and Pandora's Box). However, here, on the NIWA forums, and with a template on member wiki Wars Wiki, we've created a way to fix this. This template uses a custom magic word to display the user's chosen dialect of English, and then changes the displayed word via a #switch statement. It's particularly useful there, since they have a larger proportion of EU members (and are UK-based), but several times more US visits, hence it defaults to US English. I feel this would be massively useful to us, since I know we have quite a few Europeans (such as me)/Australians/New Zealanders, and with the growing in-game differences, this would help solve dilemmas such as that I faced when writing the Spirit Tracks guide (which appears in every guide page). We've also got some other templates like this, but for now, I feel this is most useful.

[Axiomist]

Just saying I'm willing to use it when I write up pages, which I'll get back to doing soon. I can tell you this, At Zelda Wiki, we didn't pay much attention outside of the US names for years. And we rarely had visitors from outside of the US. To cast a larger net in search engine results, I made the names template. We wanted to list the names of everything in other regions to offer that information and so that someone that only knows Byrne as Staven would get ZeldaWiki.org in google's results. This initially led to a few users from France editing frequently to fill in the names they knew. And we ended up seeing a lot more international users, from the Eastern Hemisphere, but not limited to Europe.