Editing Philosophical Research:Spaghetti containment procedures (section)

== Name Items in country-independent language ==

Items, in terms of their outward-facing label, should be named in language independent of writers' country, population, religion, and culture — a form of language sometimes referred to in the <cite>MDem</cite> text and adjacent materials as "[[Term:post-language|post-language]]".

In many cases this will also apply to [[E:plurality|parallel ideologies]]: words such as "Stalinism", "labor aristocracy", and "aleatory materialism" should be avoided because they are specific to a localized sect of Marxism and happen to come with a highly-specific meaning which would not be intuitive to associate with that word for anyone outside that localized sect or party.

in many cases this requirement may seem difficult or impossible to fully achieve because some combinations of concepts are fundamentally confusing to people and people fundamentally cannot agree on the same thing to call them. if this happens, make broad use of the ability to put multiple labels on items, and simply commit to the same concepts having a myriad different names. Items are given numerical identifiers for a reason; make full use of the fact that numerical identifiers are technically not language and commit to the integer number being the only mandatory name that everybody must use.

=== Dialect spellings ===

Occasionally there will be entries in which a word comes up in an alias or word definition which would be useful for finding the page but has different spellings in different countries, such as "color" and "colour". While it is okay to pick one and use it consistently for any particular page, you also want people to be able to search for the page by using either term. There are a few different ways to do this.

Within definitions on Term pages, you can simply use HTML comments to group the spellings together: <code>&lt;li&gt;A color between blue and green.   &lt;!-- color colour --&gt;</code>

Within Item aliases, include the alternate spellings in parentheses, generally along with a field this way of referring to things is used in: <code>color between blue and green (colour; arts)</code>

If for some reason the matter of country spellings becomes a big problem where two countries both want the whole page in their own dialect, it is acceptable to create a second localized page for a particular dialect, such that if the main entry is <code>Q6,18</code> (implying <code>Q6,18/en</code>) the localized entry might be <code>Q6,18/en-AU</code>. While MediaWiki's page language feature does not inherently support giving pages country-specific language codes, the multilingual alias box pattern is independent of this feature, meaning pages can be created for any dialect if editors deem it important.

=== Screen readers ===

Text-to-speech technologies and their text-reading "dialects" should always be included in the discussion of local language versus post-language. When possible, take any dubious page title, bit of markup, or unusual word and find a screen reader convenient to you to test it in. For page titles, you can do this before creating a page by simply opening up the empty page title. For page text, you may have to submit an edit before testing the page or fixing it. You are not obligated to instantly test every bit of text in existence on the wiki in ten screen readers, but if and when you see that some particular thing has actually become a problem in another screen reader it should be fixed. If disabled readers discover the problem before you do, allow them to provide a fix to the markup in the particular way they want, or alternatively, do not create fixes that are distinguishable from the proposed fix. There may be situations such as with Item color swatches where a fix needs to provide different functionality to both sighted users and screen readers or another alternate form of presentation such as a colorblind stylesheet; use your best judgement, but do not make the screen reader experience a worse experience.