[Wikipedia-l] It's about its

[tarquin]

earlier post by brion:

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

It takes a while -- hence my idea to cut the list down in most cases!


Poor, Edmund W wrote:

>Most of us can readily apply the following two rules:
>* to show possession, it's correct to use: its
>* we may change "it is" to its contraction: it's
>
>So, I would like to be able to search for instances of:
>
>   it's
>
>...so I can check whether it's being used as a contraction for "it is" (correct) or as a possessive (incorrect: change to "its").
>
>But when I tried to use Wikipedia search, entering: 
>
>   it\'s
>
>I got a bunch of articles with the following 2 characters highlighted in red:
>
>   's
>
>...which is a superset of what I want.
>
>What is the correct search string to enter? 
>
>
>  
>