English English vs American English vs In an earlier edit changing petrol to gas I wrote in the edit comment that I was changing the wording to American English gas because that s the standard for this Wikipedia Another user pointed out that my assertion of an American English standard for this Wikipedia was incorrect according to the Wikipedia Manual of Style That user is correct I was unaware of the Manual of Style s position on this so I read into it According to the MoS there is no standard form of English for the English language Wikipedia Instead the language that one uses in a given article depends on 1 the form of English most closely associated with the topic and 2 the form of English used by the first major contributor to the article The article should in any case adhere to one standard form of English for example American English British English Canadian English Indian English or Australian English I d like to talk about this for a bit because I think we may have an interesting boundary case in this article that helps further define the MoS policy on how to select the correct English variant for an article English language variants and Unimogs Item 1 above says that the version of English used in an article should be the one most closely aligned with the subject The Unimog is a German truck and so one would have a hard time saying that there is a particular form of English closely aligned with the topic at least when it s spoken of in Germany The Unimog has an especially weak association with England as the British military and farm trades did not as far as I know make much use of the Unimog instead heavily prefering the British designed and built Land Rovers The Unimog was used in many other nations however including Switzerland by the Swiss military and some nations in Africa and Asia I am not aware of the modern history of the Unimog outside of Europe but I know that in the 60s and 70s when it was at its peak in terms of exposts it was purchased in these regions for military applications In Asia and Africa I am unaware of any particularly strong association between the Unimog and a given variant of English There was one market the Unimog was sold in where there was a strong association with a particular variant of English and that was the United States Daimler Benz through its dealers and representatives has sold and services Unimogs in the United States for I believe over twenty years To add to American English argument in recent years Daimler Benz merged with Chrysler Chrysler is a US company Further the US company Applied Minds as widely publicized a variant of the Unimog called the Maximog This Unimog has received press coverage a Google search turns up articles on this project in the US newsmedia I believe that the Unimog sold more units and has a higher profile in the United States than in any other nation where English is the official language though perhaps Canada could make a claim I would like to hear whether others feel that the Unimog has a particularly strong association with Britain Canada India Australia or another country whose version of English is widely recognized English language provenance of the article Item 2 above refers to the version of English used by the first major contribution to the article excluding stubs I wrote the first version of this article in Sept 2002 and I think I could argue that this was a non stub creation in American English The article remained unexpanded until 2004 when other editors added content to it These edits largely retained the American spelling but wisely introduced metric measurements which I believe are most strongly associated with Unimogs I would be surprised if a German engineered vehicle was built in terms of feet and pounds I d like to open this up to comments what do others think