In a recent (otherwise quite solid) edit of “Will changing an artifact sword to another weapon type impact game balance much?”, @okeefe changed the British spelling “artefact” to the American spelling “artifact.”
Searching our meta, I see no rule regarding whether a particular spelling is preferred, or whether someone editing a question anyway can or should change from one spelling to another.
Some common reasons to edit are:
- to fix grammatical or spelling mistakes
- to clarify the meaning of a post without changing it
- to correct minor mistakes or add addendums / updates as the post ages
- to add related resources or hyperlinks
Try to make the post substantively better when you edit, not just change a single character. Tiny, trivial edits are discouraged.
(source; emphasis mine.)
Correct use of English spelling and grammar to the best of your ability. (source)
Although one of SE's meta goals is to improve communication skills, RPG.SE citizens are here for RPG expertise, not linguistic expertise. We want citizens to feel free to edit away typos (if they're major, or as part of a more significant edit--as described in the help section), and if we start coming on down people for fixing what they think are typos but turn out to be legitimate dialectic variants, we'll lose editors.
I haven't seen any pattern of behavior to indicate that anything more sinister is going on than good faith attempts to adhere to correct English spelling and grammar, so I don't think a more strict policy needs to be enacted.
Every publisher has a stylebook, and they don't agree. Even in something like "American English," choices about the Oxford (serial) comma, whether to use "further" and "farther" or just "further," and whether to hyphenate "African American," create wide divides in style and grammar. Taken to its logical conclusion, we can't rule any style choice as right or wrong unless we adopt a specific style manual for the whole site.
That seems excessive and needless, but...
The edit in question was actually reverting a spelling change from a previous edit: the original post used "artifact," and the body text still did, but the title had been edited by an Australian who used his spelling "artefact." Okeefe reverted the spelling so it would be consistent throughout the post.
This seems like a reasonable rule of thumb.
You might be overthinking it. This might not be a case of which English is The Correct English.
D&D 4e has a thing called artifacts. I live in Australia, where we spell it "artefacts", but nevertheless, in the context of D&D 4e I will happily and consistently call them artifacts. They consistently call it that, and as far as I'm aware, they have no instances of calling them "artefacts".
It would probably be weird if some of the books called them "artefacts", just like it'd be weird if some of the books said "magick" instead of "magic." I see it as being a convention they have with a defined spelling, so I go with it.
We should probably ask okeefe though. Right?
I follow the Wikipedia policy: for AmE, BrE, and CanE (&c) spelling variants, preserve the variant of the original and standardise to that, if necessary. If it's seems to be a mix of spellings from different countries but specific words are consistent, don't try to figure out why, and leave the spelling alone. Basically, when it doubt, don't touch the spelling.
This was deemed super-important at Wikipedia in order for it not to slowly transform from a worldwide project into an American-seeming project. I agree with this reasoning, and I think it applies to this site.
Speaking personally, as an English-speaker from a non-American-English country, you'd be surprised how unwelcoming a site that erases my correct spelling from the page feels. A site that enforces AmE spellings on my own text – even if only accidentally, due to editors not paying attention to the issue of spelling variants – is a site that doesn't want me to contribute. It's not rational, but there it is.
A consequence of following this policy would be that unnecessary corrections are to be reverted to the original spelling. This shows respect for the original author, and counteracts any demographic bias rooted in the ratio of site users. It takes little effort, does minimal damage to the site, and demonstrates a dedication to being non-partisan. This would be my preference for how we handle spelling here.
While there are a lot of good points, I want to bring up ONE thing:
There are a lot of games out there. Some are in AE, some BE, some CanE, some in Aussie slang. And a lot appear first as PDFs these days. People can easily quote from these, and what is more relevant, search in them. The Adobe search, however, is dumb: If you use spelling "Glamor" when searching in a book using "Glamour" for this ability, you get no hits. When searching for "maneouvre" when the D&D 5E uses "maneuver", you don't find the paragraphs. When searching for "Magic" in Ars Magica you are lucky as they use the term "Magick", of which magic is a substring...
Personal feeling: the initial spelling in such cases should be left alone, even if you are already editing the question or answer for other reasons.
And even if we decide that we should standardize on a single spelling, seems to me that this would not be a large enough change on its own to justify making the edit in the first place, if you were not editing it anyway.
As we are playing particular systems any terms that might have alternative spelling should first the same as the spelling used by that system. If it isn't referring to a specific term then leave as the author intended.
As for whether everyone should be aware of alternative spellings, well that's a hard one. I daresay most non-American English speakers are very aware of alternative spellings as they struggle through so many sites and programs that don't recognise the 'correct' spelling (such as recognise). If there were to be a policy then it should leave as the author intended except for those specific system terms, if it is edited then it is a simple matter to revert it once the actual situation is discovered. No harm, no foul.
