Spelling

[Werthead]

I've noted that GRRM seems to mix and match UK and US spellings in the books, either that or Voyager have done a crap and incomplete job of localisation in the novels. For example we have 'Greywater Watch' but we also have 'Arbor'.

Whilst the logical thing to do is to follow the book spellings along the way (whilst ensuring there are no major edition differences, this has bitten quite a few contributors to the WoT Wikia on the ass as there have been a huge number of fairly detailed minor changes to the WoT books over the years), do we need redirect pages for those looking for the alternate spellings? 'Arbour' to 'Arbor', 'Graywater Watch' to 'Greywater Watch' and so on?

[Callum]

How much effort or burden are redirect pages? If they're searching for graywater watch in wiki, they are clearly after Greywater Watch. I've noticed the lack of redirects with a few pages, such as Ned.

If I'm looking for info on The Seven, so type that in, I get told nothing could be found and then suggested links to everything with 'the' appearing in it. Seven gets me nothing, and only when putting in 'faith', do I get redirected to 'Faith of the Seven'. Sorry, I kind of got a bit of topic here...

[Halfhand]

Having redirect pages makes the most sense to me. Which spelling should be the default one? US or UK?

[Werthead]

Having redirect pages makes the most sense to me. Which spelling should be the default one? US or UK?

I think we should default to the books, which is difficult because I don't have any US editions so I can't see if they've localised the spellings in the UK versions. As far as I can tell, they haven't (Arryn's motto is still "As High As Honor,"). That's why I thought it was odd that the spelling of 'grey' - the Grey Kings of the Iron Islands for example - throughout the books is the UK standard (although I also note that 'gray' is not universally used across the USA, according to Wikipedia).

[Halfhand]

Yeah, gray is a weird one as it is kinda interchangeable here in the States. Both are considered acceptable spellings. I guess George prefers "grey" to "gray." As for almost all the other words, I believe they follow the US spelling standard (ie just "o" not "ou").

[DJDonegal]

I think we should default to the books. My Game of Thrones is an American edition, but all the rest are the British version, and I never noticed any glaring contradictions in the spelling, so I have a feeling its been standardised across the books, just as an American writer writing "mom" will still have it appear as "mom" when published by a British company. So I say we stick with the books on this one, and the redirects come from the various Anglo/American contradictions to the book, such as GrAywater and ArboUr etc etc

[Werthead]

On a related note, it is annoying that the UK editions have never, as far as I can tell, had any textual revisions incorporated into them.

For example, after it was pointed out to GRRM that the Targaryen family tree in AGoT didn't make sense, he changed it by making Viserys I into Baelor and Daeron I's uncle rather than their brother. This is reflected in current American editions of AGoT, I believe.

However, I picked up a new UK copy of AGoT last year to replace my disintegrating old one and it's still got the original (i.e. 'wrong') family tree in there.