lcrocker(a)nupedia.com writes:
> Would it be possible, or desirable, to have a
system which does
> a search for one particular error at a time, eg "recieve", and
> corrects all the pages it finds in batches, of say 20, to avoid
> loading the server? Obviously, this will deal with only a
> fraction of the overall typo checking, since many things depend
> on context (eg "its" / "it's").
...
I think it should be a general policy that we should
not allow
any automatic process to alter content. The value of Wikipedia
is that real human beings with understanding and judgment have
edited the pages.
ACK.
What if there were a page about common English
mispellings
that had "recieve" there intentionally? Or perhaps it could
be someone's name, or a foreign word used in context. I
remember having a Vietnames co-worker named "Teh" who was
constantly running into the problem of spell checkers changing
his name to "The".
I see the problem, but imagine this like a search and
replace function in a texteditor: I usually don't hit "replace all", but
look at every particular instance and decide, if it should be replaced.
And something like this, if used in a responsible way (maybe only by
admins) would be a very valuable tool for the wikipedia.
So imagine a list of search results, all showing a few lines a content
around to decide if it's a mispelling (and a link to the article if this
is not enough information for you), and a checkbox beside each result to
include it in the replace or not. All still depends on human judgement,
but facilitates the editing a lot.
greetings, sorry for the bad english
elian
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