|From: Toby Bartels <toby+wikipedia(a)math.ucr.edu>
|Content-Disposition: inline
|Sender: wikipedia-l-admin(a)nupedia.com
|Reply-To: wikipedia-l(a)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