In Defense of the Queen's English
[This post may be late to the game, but in response to comments made here and here, I could no longer remain silent. I think Graham actually gives rise to a very important issue.]
It seems to me that when Graham Wegner questioned the wikipedic wisdom in relation to proper spelling, he really didn’t question Wikipedia, the crowd, or even the way that some words should be spelled.
Rather, he questioned the entire system itself and his lack of representation in such a system.
Few can argue with how effectively the Internet has managed to thrust English – as a language – into the faces of peoples and cultures throughout the world, operatively requiring the planet to learn or be lost. For if one fails to learn English, one likely fails to compete in our now global market. Nevertheless, and to the despondency of Graham and millions of others culturally similar to him, the dialect that has been thrust upon the world is not that of the Queen, but rather that of the American.
When the wisdom of the crowd is determined by the crowd, then those in the minority simply lose out. For in the end, the higher percentage of Americans that constitute the English-speaking Wikipedia community, have determined that color will rarely be colour – plausibly demonstrating that at times even spelling can be a matter of popular opinion.
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