Board Thread:Wiki Discussion/@comment-27713488-20180106040608/@comment-31763506-20180106200731

Amazingly I've lost three attempted responses here to my own and wikia's short attentions span. On the brighter side, I've saved ~15,000 ProN.

Remember that any proposed rule can be rephrased to be more of a guideline or suggestion. So the registration one could be "If you intend to make lots of contributions, registering a wikia account is helpful."

The point of the vocabulary/idiom/spelling idea is that we want to avoid slang terms or popular phrases that only exist in one dialect and may therefore confuse people approaching English as a second language. For example, if someone were to say in an article that Nailili thinks that Simon is "the dog's bollocks" or "the cat's meow", that's going to be incomprehensible to most non-Brits and non-Americans, respectively, and will probably confuse everyone else as well. (Actually, I think the last time I heard an American use the phrase "the cat's meow" was my mother in the mid-1980s, so most Americans under 40 are probably going to be equally confused, but the two figures of speech have a nice literary symmetry and illustrate the kind of thing you want to avoid.)

Likewise, we don't want to canonize (or canonise) one spelling variant over another so people are wasting their time correcting "armor" to "armour" and vice versa.

If it comes up though, I suspect we need to uphold the American definition of "billion" over the British/Continental one, particularly since the British government itself gave up on "milliard" sometime in the 1970s. Thankfully ingame value scales are mostly in line with the pound sterling of 1700 rather than modern US dollar or Japanese yen (or the late lamented Italian lira).