I think I should have put a 
at the end of my last post - look at the spelling of the last word 
In the end, though, I don’t think it makes much sense to change a language for the benefit of people who don’t speak it. Why not ask all languages to switch to IPA-based orthography?
Though Tapioca was joking, I’ll point out that many people feel the same about citing Wikipedia as you. I only cite it for topics I’m familiar with, so that I can tell when it’s outright wrong, and in any event, it’s unlikely that articles about diacritical marks in various languages are going to be wildly inaccurate, as these are not controversial topics with many users changing the articles to reflect their personal beliefs.
Wikipedia is almost always accurate, because the editors usually catch incorrect edits – but with the controversial topics, the edits can happen faster than they get caught, so I don’t use Wikipedia for such things.
I’d support that: I’m a bit rusty but 1 month into my linguistics class I was reading IPA-ized English nearly as fast as regular English.
In the case of English – and this probably applies to many other widely-spoken languages – you’d need to do two things:
(1) Agree on which spoken dialect we are transcribing.
(2) Stop that spoken dialect from changing in the future.
On point (1), does “tune” get written as “tu:n”, “tju:n” or “tʃu:n”? (/tuun/, /tyuun/ or /chuun/ in more regular English spelling). I say it as /tʃu:n/ myself, but most of those around me would say /tu:n/,
Just in case there’s a misunderstanding here, my question about IPA was rhetorical. I thought that was clear when I preceded it with the opinion that languages shouldn’t be changed for the benefit of people who don’t speak them.
Because that would mean every book in the world would eventually become obsolete.
Diacritics are different, though. They can show you which syllables to stress.
ETA: And we’re not changing the language. We’re just suggesting ways to change how it’s written.
To continue along this thought, it’s not the prounciation (what’s represented by the IPA) that’s important, but the phonemes. Phonemes are the digital units our brains extract from the analog phonetics. They tend to vary much less than the actual pronunciations do, across regional and temporal dialects.
But there isn’t a standard stress on a particular syllable for many words. What is the proper syllable to stress on the word “component”? My buddy from Kansas aways says it as: COM-po-nent. That’s certainly not the way I say it.