I found and corrected 19 separate instances of "seperate" in the Wikipedia today.
All of these are currently in Wikipedia articles. I could use a little help.
headquaters - 6 offical - 5 decendents - 4 thrid - 3 assasination - 2 possibilty - 2 pursuade - 2 seperating - 2 soliders - 2 assitant - 1 beacuse - 1 constuction - 1 disolved - 1 embarassing - 1 grafitti - 1 increadible - 1 relized - 1 seperated - 1
Ed Poor (If you peel an orange incorrectly, that is a mispeeling.)
Poor, Edmund W wrote:
I found and corrected 19 separate instances of "seperate" in the Wikipedia today.
All of these are currently in Wikipedia articles. I could use a little help.
How aboutYet Another Special Page (maybe part of the Maintenance Page)? It could scan through wikipedia searching for common typos defined in a special "article" (wikipedia:typos?).
Magnus
----- Original Message ----- From: "Poor, Edmund W" Edmund.W.Poor@abc.com To: wikipedia-l@nupedia.com Sent: Friday, October 18, 2002 7:00 PM Subject: [Wikipedia-l] Mispeelings
I found and corrected 19 separate instances of "seperate" in the Wikipedia
today.
All of these are currently in Wikipedia articles. I could use a little
help.
headquaters - 6 offical - 5 decendents - 4 thrid - 3 assasination - 2 possibilty - 2 pursuade - 2 seperating - 2 soliders - 2 assitant - 1 beacuse - 1 constuction - 1 disolved - 1 embarassing - 1 grafitti - 1 increadible - 1 relized - 1 seperated - 1
Welcome to the Wikipedia Gardening club, Ed. We may not be as sexy as the Militia but there's always plenty weeding to keep us busy!
I must admit that I haven't checked out "separate" for a while but there are always plenty of similar "weeds" to find. "suprising" and "comittee" to name but two. I like Magnus's idea for Yet Another Special Page working off Wikipedia:Typos though. Automated finding isn't the complete answer but it would be a very useful tool.
Cheers
Derek
I shamefully admit to mistyping "seperate" on occasions. Funny thing is I spell it correctly in longhand. Unfortunately I have very lazy fingers which find hitting "e" twice easier. :(
could we add "it's" to the 3-letter words we can search for? That's a *very* common error.
Derek Ross wrote:
Welcome to the Wikipedia Gardening club, Ed. We may not be as sexy as the Militia but there's always plenty weeding to keep us busy!
I must admit that I haven't checked out "separate" for a while but there are always plenty of similar "weeds" to find. "suprising" and "comittee" to name but two. I like Magnus's idea for Yet Another Special Page working off Wikipedia:Typos though. Automated finding isn't the complete answer but it would be a very useful tool.
tarquin wrote:
could we add "it's" to the 3-letter words we can search for? That's a *very* common error.
There are 1,178 pages in article space containing the word "it's". If you _really_ want to wade through them looking for the erroneous ones, go to the SQL query page and run:
SELECT cur_title from cur where cur_namespace=0 and cur_text regexp "[[:<:]]it's[[:>:]]" order by cur_title
(Which reminds me -- I thought we'd lowered the 3-byte search limit to 2?)
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
Brion
I'll add this to the Useful Database queries stuff I'm building on MetaWikipedia, ta.
Steve Callaway
----- Original Message ----- From: "Brion VIBBER" brion@pobox.com To: wikipedia-l@nupedia.com Sent: Sunday, October 20, 2002 2:33 AM Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] Mispeelings
tarquin wrote:
could we add "it's" to the 3-letter words we can search for? That's a *very* common error.
There are 1,178 pages in article space containing the word "it's". If you _really_ want to wade through them looking for the erroneous ones, go to the SQL query page and run:
SELECT cur_title from cur where cur_namespace=0 and cur_text regexp "[[:<:]]it's[[:>:]]" order by cur_title
(Which reminds me -- I thought we'd lowered the 3-byte search limit to 2?)
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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Brion VIBBER wrote:
tarquin wrote:
could we add "it's" to the 3-letter words we can search for? That's a *very* common error.
There are 1,178 pages in article space containing the word "it's". If you _really_ want to wade through them looking for the erroneous ones, go to the SQL query page and run:
SELECT cur_title from cur where cur_namespace=0 and cur_text regexp "[[:<:]]it's[[:>:]]" order by cur_title
If we change all "it's" to either "its" or the more formal "it is", then that list will gradually diminish.
|From: Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net |X-Accept-Language: en-us |Sender: wikipedia-l-admin@nupedia.com |Reply-To: wikipedia-l@nupedia.com |Date: Sun, 20 Oct 2002 07:59:59 -0700 | |tarquin wrote: | |> If we change all "it's" to either "its" or the more formal "it is", |> then that list will gradually diminish. | |All!!!??? Some how changing the song title to "It is a Long Way to |Tipperary" doesn't seem right to me :-( | |Eclecticology |
'Tis nonsense. Are there to be no contractions in Wikipedia?
Ray Saintonge wrote:
tarquin wrote:
If we change all "it's" to either "its" or the more formal "it is", then that list will gradually diminish.
All!!!??? Some how changing the song title to "It is a Long Way to Tipperary" doesn't seem right to me :-(
I wasn't planning on changing *quoted* text. :-)
If the error in "anual" were that an extra letter had been put in
rather than a letter omitted, psychological texts could end up talking about people with annual retentive personalities.
The upshot is that this feature is very useful but careful human checking is required!
tarquin wrote:
If we change all "it's" to either "its" or the more formal "it is", then that list will gradually diminish.
So we're at the point now where it's been suggested to remove a word ("it's") entirely from Wikipedia because it's difficult to tell when it's misspelled? This is far more zealous than we need to be. Correct them when you find them, but don't go overboard -- they're just mispeelings!
-- Toby
|From: Toby Bartels toby+wikipedia@math.ucr.edu |Content-Disposition: inline |Sender: wikipedia-l-admin@nupedia.com |Reply-To: wikipedia-l@nupedia.com |Date: Mon, 21 Oct 2002 00:02:46 -0700 | |tarquin wrote: | |>If we change all "it's" to either "its" or the more formal "it is", then |>that list will gradually diminish. | |So we're at the point now where it's been suggested |to remove a word ("it's") entirely from Wikipedia |because it's difficult to tell when it's misspelled? |This is far more zealous than we need to be. |Correct them when you find them, but don't go overboard -- |they're just mispeelings! | | |-- Toby
I guess I'll need to explain this. There are two words with the letter sequence I T S.
One is the contraction of "it is" and is marked by an apostrophe ('), between the T and the S.
The other is a possessive pronoun and has no apostrophe.
Since many forms of the possessive end with an apostrophe and an S, some people write "it's" for the possessive form when they should have written "its". Likewise, although more rarely, some people write "its" when they should have written "it's".
There is no "mispelling" involved in this error and there is no way in hell any computer program in SQL can tell the difference between these two frequently confused forms and correct the error.
Tom Parmenter Ortolan88
Tom Parmenter wrote:
Toby Bartels wrote:
tarquin wrote:
If we change all "it's" to either "its" or the more formal "it is", then that list will gradually diminish.
So we're at the point now where it's been suggested to remove a word ("it's") entirely from Wikipedia because it's difficult to tell when it's misspelled? This is far more zealous than we need to be. Correct them when you find them, but don't go overboard -- they're just mispeelings!
I guess I'll need to explain this.
There is no need to explain anything. I'm perfectly aware of everything that you say below (except for the claim that there is no misspelling, which is quite false). I stand by my comment.
There are two words with the letter sequence I T S.
One is the contraction of "it is" and is marked by an apostrophe ('), between the T and the S.
The other is a possessive pronoun and has no apostrophe.
Since many forms of the possessive end with an apostrophe and an S, some people write "it's" for the possessive form when they should have written "its". Likewise, although more rarely, some people write "its" when they should have written "it's".
There is no "mispelling" involved in this error and there is no way in hell any computer program in SQL can tell the difference between these two frequently confused forms and correct the error.
-- Toby
Toby Bartels wrote:
If we change all "it's" to either "its" or the more formal "it is", then that list will gradually diminish.
So we're at the point now where it's been suggested to remove a word ("it's") entirely from Wikipedia because it's difficult to tell when it's misspelled? This is far more zealous than we need to be. Correct them when you find them, but don't go overboard -- they're just mispeelings!
Sheesh. Yet another minor issue that blows out of all proportion -- can we drop it now? If I were going on a hunt for incorrect uses of "it's", correcting most to "its" or "it is" has the advantage of shortening the next list of search results. I certainly wasn't suggesting changing "it's a long way to tipperary". I can't speak for AmEnglish, but in BrEnglish, a contraction such as "it's" is considered a little too informal for a work such as an encyclopedia or a dictionary.
Perhaps it was UK-centric of me to assume that that holds in AmEng too, in which case I apologize (but note that many US wikipedians could do with a healthy dose of culture shock to shake a few us-centric attitudes.)
tarquin wrote:
If I were going on a hunt for incorrect uses of "it's", correcting most to "its" or "it is" has the advantage of shortening the next list of search results.
Except that changing "it's" to "it is" is not a correction. If I saw a change from "it's" to "it is" that made the article read worse, then I would want to change it back.
I certainly wasn't suggesting changing "it's a long way to tipperary".
I assumed as much.
I can't speak for AmEnglish, but in BrEnglish, a contraction such as "it's" is considered a little too informal for a work such as an encyclopedia or a dictionary.
Then I won't change "it is" back to "it's" in an article about Britain (just as I wouldn't use American spelling there -- not that I normally use American spelling, but pretend that I did).
Perhaps it was UK-centric of me to assume that that holds in AmEng too, in which case I apologize (but note that many US wikipedians could do with a healthy dose of culture shock to shake a few us-centric attitudes.)
Fair enough.
-- Toby
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