Steve Bennett wrote:
On Mon, Dec 7, 2009 at 8:23 PM, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
Most of the typos for "MySpace.com" and "google.com" had been created and deleted by db-R3 (typo unlikely to happen in real life). I recreated them with an edit summary pointing to that page, as evidence that people's typing really is consistently much worse than we'd like to think ...
There is an argument that MediaWiki should really just have a very good natural language search engine that can guess what users are looking for, despite any typos.
There's an even better argument that a hand-built search engine built by thousands of monkeys addressing every query individually will outperform it every time.
And there is a further argument that [[Wikipedia:Criteria for speedy deletion#Redirects]] should reflect this by stronger wording. As in "if any doubt, don't nominate or delete, since the resource implications of retaining a redirect for a typo are tiny." I.e. much less than arguing about it.
Charles