On Mon, Dec 7, 2009 at 8:23 PM, David Gerard
<dgerard(a)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