June 2012

change

  Welcome to Wikipedia. Everyone is welcome to make helpful changes to Wikipedia. However, some of your changes, like those to "Orthography", did not seem to be helpful and have been reverted or removed. If you want to try out changing Wikipedia to learn more about how it works, please use the sandbox. Thank you.

  • The changes you made to Orthography are not appropriate. I'll explain this: it is not allowed for you to removed text and replace it with your personal opinions. Particularly, do not remove text which is supported by reliable references. To remove someone else's work without good reason is vandalism, and will be treated as such. Changes in text which are not supported by reliable references are not what we need. This is meant to be an encyclopedia, not a collection of opinions. Macdonald-ross (talk) 06:32, 2 June 2012 (UTC)Reply

Some points

change

 • I have made some changes after thinking about your points. I took a decision originally to handle orthography and spelling together on one page (they are separate on enWP). Now the text is clearer about the meaning of the first term.

 • Of course, I know and agree that the English alphabet was originally a take-up of the Latin alphabet. Further on I've tried to show something of the far-reaching influence of Greek on English and other European alphabets.

 • If you want to make changes or additions, it is good to remember that referencing reliable sources is critical on wikipedia.

 • Young people, including children, are not our only target. We have quite a lot of editors and readers whose native language in not English, and we have users with various reading difficulties. These are also in our target audience, as defined by the wikipedia mission statement which set us up.

 • I'm not sure I quite understand why 'spelling' needs a definition. What the word means is surely transparent: the order of letters in a word. Maybe you'll enlighten me.

 • The best place to put discussions about an article is on its talk page.

Regards, Macdonald-ross (talk) 18:57, 2 June 2012 (UTC)Reply

Continuing the theme of new articles (on the talk page of Orthography):
Editors are free to do what they think is appropriate, so long as their work in line with (and supported by) reliable references. New pages may be written from scratch or brought over from English wiki and simplified. Both methods have their problems. Pages written from scratch need references. Pages brought over from enWP can be difficult to simplify, and often are too long and complicated for our readers. You can set up an editing page for work by starting it as [[user:Onevoicein10billion/S1]]. When the content of the page is ready to be put up, you enter the title in the search box, and transfer the content by copy & paste. No doubt you know all that stuff, but I thought I'd mention it.

Macdonald-ross (talk) 09:53, 4 June 2012 (UTC)Reply