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: 
You might be overthinking it. This might not be a case of which English is The Correct English.

D&D 4e has a thing called artifacts. I live in Australia, where we spell it "artefacts", but nevertheless, in the context of D&D 4e I will happily and consistently call them artifacts. They consistently call it that, and as far as I'm aware, they have no instances of calling them "artefacts".

It would probably be weird if some of the books called them "artefacts", just like it'd be weird if some of the books said "magick" instead of "magic." I see it as being a convention they have with a defined spelling, so I go with it.

We should probably ask okeefe though. Right?
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...