Wikipedia’s war over Pippa Middleton and Dreadful Americanisms

Pippa Middleton: Many Wiki-munchkins don't want to give her one (her own page on Wikipedia, that is)

Behind the scenes, there is currently an intense debate going on at Wikipedia over whether Pippa Middleton deserves a page entry on the all-for-one encyclopedia as “Notable”.

A page dedicated to her which went up on the site was subsequently deleted by an over-enthusiastic wiki-munchkin of a republican bent who obviously thought that being the sister of a future Queen was no justification for making Pippa a Notable. Cue outrage from those – presumably mostly from this side of the pond, though you can’t tell unless you sat there doing pingbacks on each commentator – who think that relationship, plus the fact that over week after That Wedding, Miss Middleton continues to fill the news pages, airwaves and social media bandwidth.

The whole debate is quite smirkily amusing in a geeky, look-how-the-saddo-half-live sort of way, though I did find the following exchange funny:

Edit request from Lelegirli, 30 April 2011

the word organize is misspelled.

Lelegirli (talk) 19:24, 30 April 2011 (UTC)

No its not, in British English, organise is spelt with an s–Jac16888 ^Talk 19:39, 30 April 2011 (UTC)

Some popular forms of British English do use an -s- instead of a -z- in “organize”, but more traditional British English (including Oxford English) uses a -z-. I am old-fashioned English and always use a -z- for “organize”, “realize”, “antagonize”, etc. Moonraker2 (talk) 22:57, 30 April 2011 (UTC)

Lelegirli, you started your sentence with a lower case letter, which is incorrect. You also spelt mispelt as “misspelled” which is the American spelling, so I assume you are from the USA and probably unaware that anything else exists beyond that country. But just to let you know that there are differences between American and British spellings, and both are acceptable on Wikipedia. See here: WP:AmE. Childrens do learn. 82.152.209.221 (talk) 14:03, 1 May 2011 (UTC)

As Wikipedia was originally an American initiative, U.S. English is preferred, but there is an exception for specifically British topics.95.49.244.248 (talk) 13:11, 6 May 2011 (UTC)

You might as well argue that as the US was originally a UK initiative, UK spelling is to be preferred. Ericoides (talk) 21:10, 7 May 2011 (UTC)

And answer to that came there none…

Six great media hoaxes

The story in Media Guardian here about how a film company successfully hoaxed the tabloids into running fake celebrity “news” – Amy Winehouse’s beehive goes up in flames, Girls Aloud’s Sarah Harding is a secret boffin who enjoys curling up with a good book on quantum physics of an evening, etc – has something of a “so what else is new?” tiredness about it.