On Fri, Sep 13, 2002 at 04:45:48PM -0700, lcrocker@nupedia.com wrote:
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?
Why doesn't someone just add a function, that before submitting every article/change, it runs a spell checker, writes all the ``mistakes'' and possible ``corrections'' along with an editable field of the article bellow. This way the editor can see his/her mistakes and correct them very easily.
Note that I don't propose anything like: ,,You have written 'recieve', would you like to change it [Y/N]'', but rather a _list_ off all the mistakes displayed at once. Thus you don't _have_to_ make some extra effort, it just helps you to realize that this and that word may be bogus.
Something like:
recieve => receive, ... interestig => interesting, ... etc.
<field for editing article>
[preview] [submit]
I think it could also correct all the mistakes at majority of the pages very quickly since with _every_ edit, the person who is editing is noticed about these possible problems. (But I'm sure it wouldn't work if you only add a button ``spell-checking'', you have to display it _every_ time!) The editor can use his own judgement to decide to fix it or not. The server load is not so heavy, because there are not so much submits and these are distributed through all the day. For me, that seems better than some one-time massive corrections. Use ispell/aspell or something.
Btw., thanx you all for Wikipedia! Hynek