Category talk:Sport

Name not universal

While I understand how this category is organized — Category:Sport as the parent of Category:Sports — it's not very intuitive for North American speakers of English. In NA, "sport" is merely the singular of "sports", so these appear to be the same category. Where Commonwealth nations (outside of Canada and The Bahamas) have a "Sport" page, North Americans generally have a "Sports" page. "Sports" is used to both define a whole realm of knowledge and to categorize the individual kinds of sporting competition. If your only real interface with British culture is Doctor Who and the occasional episode of Masterpiece Theatre on PBS, you're gonna scratch your head and wonder what's the difference between Category:Sport and Category:Sports. I can appreciate that DW is a British show, and to some extent British English should predominate, but this is one case where being stubborn about that can actually lead to misunderstanding. In the spirit of making the site friendly to a worldwide audience, is there a name this category could have which would be acceptable to both British and North American speakers? Perhaps, Category:Things having to do with sport (still not quite "true" to the North American ear, but clear enough) or Category:Sport and athletic competition (not entirely perfect, because the British use the term "athletic" to mean "track and field"). But it's a good compromise because it uses one term in the Commonwealth sense and one in the North American (outside of Jamaica). Plus, it allows us to sneak in things like martial arts, which aren't really sports, and it allows for easy alphabetization. CzechOut ☎ | ✍ 13:51, March 12, 2010 (UTC)

We do use British English as the English of choice on this wiki.

I'm not sure if going through and changing this would be the best thing, as it may set a precedent to lead to other categories, articles etc being altered to a more 'middle ground' wording.

Using one term from one and another from another, just I think serves to confuse the issue. Wouldn't it perhaps just be better to have in the Sport category a definition of what that category does.

There are several instances on this wiki where logical things may be taken out of context/lead to misunderstandings. It's the nature of language there is going to be some misunderstandings, but clarifications usually help (we can always link on the page to the Wikipedia page Wikipedia:American and British English differences). I mean there are several misunderstandings that go through language between British and American English, rugby/football/soccer for example. Or fanny (means something different between US and UK, much to the amusement/offence of those in the UK). --Tangerineduel 14:36, March 12, 2010 (UTC)