Talk:aluminum

Why is aluminium a second-class citizen?
Why is aluminium listed as "alternative" when aluminum is chiefly North American English? --Mortense (talk) 11:00, 29 October 2016 (UTC)
 * IUPAC made the decision that scientists would use the US spelling of (rather than ) and the UK spelling of  (rather than ). It's a compromise. SemperBlotto (talk) 13:51, 29 October 2016 (UTC)
 * The practice here is to arbitrarily choose one of the forms as the main entry and make the other an alternative form. It's not always the US form that's chosen, so it averages out. Having two main entries causes things to get out of synch, and there's no way there will ever be a consensus on always choosing US or always choosing UK. It's imperfect, and far from systematic, but it's prevented constant bickering and edit wars for some time. Chuck Entz (talk) 16:28, 29 October 2016 (UTC)