''-ise''

You've revised my editing on minimise with the explanation, that the spelling with -ize is worldwide and -ise is just regional. That's wrong. Actually, the spelling with -ise is the preferred spelling in 52 of the 54 countries, which use English as their main language. Just in to countries, United States and Canada, the spelling with -ize is the preferred. If you look at governmental pages of India, you will always find the spelling with -ise. The same with websites from South Africa, Namibia, Pakistan, Singapore and many other countries. Even Russia's governmental websites use the -ise spelling (see Amur programme etc.) as long with all pages of the European Union and other European organisations. So you can't tell me, that minimise, maximise is just regional. It is now spread at least as the variant with z, if not even more, so both spellings should be treated equally on a platform like Wiktionary.

They are treated equally. We just don't want to duplicate the information, that causes maintenance problems. How many countries favour it is not relevant for this case.

But why is -ize in preferred in favour ahead of -ise? Wouldn't be a technical solution the best, which synchronises both articles automatically?

We've tried to do things like that, but nothing ended up working right. It became rather messy and inconsistent. It's not as easy as you may think because sometimes the two forms are not exact synonyms. For example, program has all the senses of programme, but also a few extra.

Maybe this could be done at first only with things like ise/ize, yse/yze and labelled/labeled and all those which have no different meaning. So that the content of the article "minimize" is getting embedded into the article "minimise". As far as I know, there are similar solutions for Wikipedia, where the embedded template depends on the used spelling.

If you want to change it, you should start a new topic at Wiktionary:Beer parlour.

Our current practice is to avoid changes based on the regional differences: if someone creates an entry with -ize, we leave it as -ize. If someone creates an entry with -ise, it's left as -ise. We've debated various other ways of doing things, but the only ones that have achieved much of a consensus have failed for practical reasons. No one is particularly thrilled with the status quo, but everyone wants to avoid the kind of endless pondian edit wars likely to result from adopting something without a broad consensus. As an aside, SemperBlotto and CodeCat are both from Europe and use the -ise spelling, so there's no regional bias involved here. Chuck Entz (talk) 15:19, 25 August 2013 (UTC)