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...
As we are playing particular systems any terms that might have alternative spelling should first the same as the spelling used by that system. If it isn't referring to a specific term then leave as the author intended.

As for whether everyone should be aware of alternative spellings, well that's a hard one. I daresay most non-American English speakers are very aware of alternative spellings as they struggle through so many sites and programs that don't recognise the 'correct' spelling (such as recognise). If there were to be a policy then it should leave as the author intended except for those specific system terms, if it is edited then it is a simple matter to revert it once the actual situation is discovered. No harm, no foul.