Thread by @depthsofwiki

Wikipedia editors spent seven years and 140,000 words (longer than Homer's Odyssey) fighting over A SINGLE LETTER in the name of this dairy product. Thread!

In 2002, an anonymous volunteer created the article "Yogurt." Everything was fine until Christmas 2003 when someone named Derek randomly changed it to "Yughurt," the British Commonwealth spelling. An argument EXPLODED. It was like the Revolutionary War had never ended

BTW in the 2000s, tons of British vs. American battles were breaking out — Petrol vs Gasoline, Humor vs Humour, "Orange (colour)" vs. "Orange (color)," corn vs maize (which I posted about last year)

https://x.com/depthsofwiki/status/1614045362985082881

To this day, Wikipedia titles and spelling are totally inconsistent when it comes to British vs. American style: Gasoline, Humour, Orange (colour), Jewellery, Grey, Theatre, etc. The general rule is to stick with what the article's creator used. For yogurt, that was yogurt!

Also, "yogurt" got more Google hits, book mentions, and was more similar to the original Turkish yoğurt. So between 2005 and 2011, Wikipedians launched SEVEN formal proposals to move Yoghurt to Yogurt. Each time, the same thing happened: the Brits showed up (and Commonwealth)

They did not want it to be USApedia. Debate devolved into bickering. In all, there's enough crying over fermented milk that if you started reading the discussion as a 9pm bedtime story, the sun would come up before you finished. Maybe then you could have yog(h)urt for breakfast

There was some active cultured debate but most of the discussion was just random bullshit like this

As years wore on, people increasingly fought against the fight itself. They argued that switching Yoghurt --> Yogurt would only prolong the already rotten and curdling dispute. This sect just wanted everyone to be done with yog(h)urt. You could call them lactose intolerant

Here's a sample of how emotionally-charged things got over on the yogurt talk page en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Yogu…

Wikipedia implores contributors to assume good faith and avoid personal attacks. Most discussions are, all things considered, quite civil. But not yog(h)urt

fwiw, the specific spat above got resolved

On December 10 2011, Wikipedians reached a rather dubious "consensus" to remove the h. Yoghurt became yogurt. And.. it stuck this time! For 12 years, the yogurt talk page has been mostly free from title-related imbroglios.

But alas, there are always horrors of other varieties

The end! Wikipedians finally decided how to spell yogurt and it only required an argument the length of four and a half Hamlets