I've been pondering. There are some typos and common spelling mistakes which are no-brainers to catch and fix, but require a lot of grunt work. Would it be possible, or desirable, to have a system which does a search for one particular error at a time, eg "recieve", and corrects all the pages it finds in batches, of say 20, to avoid loading the server? Obviously, this will deal with only a fraction of the overall typo checking, since many things depend on context (eg "its" / "it's"). Would this be best implemented as a system tool, or as a seperate script (like the Eason's Bible Dictionary import)? -- tarquin
I think it should be a general policy that we should not allow any automatic process to alter content. The value of Wikipedia is that real human beings with understanding and judgment have edited the pages.
What if there were a page about common English mispellings that had "recieve" there intentionally? Or perhaps it could be someone's name, or a foreign word used in context. I remember having a Vietnames co-worker named "Teh" who was constantly running into the problem of spell checkers changing his name to "The".