Question: In a recent (otherwise quite solid) edit of [“Will changing an artifact sword to another weapon type impact game balance much?”](https://rpg.stackexchange.com/q/30616/4563), @okeefe changed the British spelling “artefact” to the American spelling “artifact.”

Searching our meta, I see no rule regarding whether a particular spelling is preferred, or whether someone editing a question *anyway* can or should change from one spelling to another.

Answer: 
While there are a lot of good points, I want to bring up ONE thing:

Keep Game Terms as they appear in the books!
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There are a lot of games out there. Some are in AE, some BE, some CanE, some in Aussie slang. And a lot appear first as PDFs these days. People can easily quote from these, and what is more relevant, *search* in them. The Adobe search, however, is dumb: If you use spelling "Glamor" when searching in a book using "Glamour" for this ability, you get no hits. When searching for "maneouvre" when the D&D 5E uses "maneuver", you don't find the paragraphs. When searching for "Magic" in Ars Magica you are lucky as they use the term "Magick", of which magic is a substring...
Personal feeling: the initial spelling in such cases should be left alone, even if you are already editing the question or answer for other reasons.

And even if we decide that we should standardize on a single spelling, seems to me that this would not be a large enough change on its own to justify making the edit in the first place, if you were not editing it anyway.