Wikipedia:Engvar workshop

Different varieties of English use slightly different spellings, the reasons are mainly historical and geographical, but many were deliberately introduced by Noah Webster.

Wikipedia customary usage, guidance, and maybe even policy along with the community is tolerant of these varieties but intolerant of mixing them on the same article.

At some point a system of annotating articles with (dated) templates do denote the variety of English was brought into play, thus {{Tlx|Use American English}} and {{Tlx|Use British English}}. Quite possibly it was thought that these would also cover differences other than spelling: grammar, vocabulary, style etc. (Accent of course not being an issue.) However WP:COMMON discourages the use of language features that create dissonance in the a reader native to another language style. As a result these templates are largely a spelling guide.

A scripted effort to help keep spelling styles within articles consistent was undertaken a number of years ago. For the words dealt with by the script it was sufficient to use three styles, EngvarA, EngvarB and EngvarC. Here A corresponds to American spelling, B to British and C to Canadian. Again within the bounds of the script all national varieties conformed to one of these. It might have been better if EngvarX, EngvarY and EngvarZ had been chosen, because, it turns out, people want a template for their country. Seeing "EngvarA" replace "Use Bigendian English" seemed to subsume Bigendia into America.

An effort was made to deprecate the Engvar family of templates recently. It may be relevant that at the same time a parallel attempt was made to reduce the number of "Use Fooian English" templates, which was largely unsuccessful, but did manage to delete {{Tlx|Use Antarctic English}}.

1. Deprecation assumed that every article had either strong national ties or a discernible style, so could be simply migrated to a "Use Fooian English" template. This was not the case: suppose "Lagrange's Theorem" was "EngvarB" - should it become "Use British English", or "Use Australian English"? What about "New Zealand Ghana Relations"?
2. The script relies on the Engvar templates and no-one has made the effort to migrate it.
3. Community relations became strained.

• Modify the {{Tlx|Use Fooian English}} templates to support a second parameter {{Tlx|Use Fooian English|1=date=June 2025|2=Engvar=January 2025}}. This will perform the same function as the appropriate Engvar template, and will only be updated by the script. (Question: Should the EngVar param default to the Date param? Yes, at least temporarily, as otherwise there will be a lot of undated items.) This is a trivial change.
• Modify the Engvar script to support the above. I believe this would be very simple, just a question of updating a different template on completion of the actual spelling work.

; Advantages

• Minimal impact on editors and users.
• Can retain whatever granularity the community desires from {{Tlx|Use Earth English}} to {{Tlx|Use Gibraltar English}} and beyond.
• Keeps the main date field for people who work on the more subtle or finely distributes spellings.
• Allows the bulk of the clean-up work to be done by the diligent users of the Engvar script.

• [https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Template%3AUse_British_English&diff=1297624905&oldid=1012413514 Example change] to a template: This supports a default for the Engvar parameter.
• User:Rich Farmbrough/script/EngvarB.js seems to work. I've only tested it a little.

I commend the proposal to the house. All the best: Rich Farmbrough 09:06, 27 June 2025 (UTC).