At 03:58 PM 7/21/02 +1000, Karen aka Kajikit wrote:
I agree, disambigs for typos would be a bad idea. Redirects for common misspellings have proven useful, however. If a person typed "colombus" but meant to type "colobus", they would end up at the wrong page with or without a redirect.
The way I look at it is this - I am a reasonably good speller, but I am dyslexic and there are some very common mistakes that I make often - confusing 'a's and 'e's in words, ommitting or adding double letters where they dont' belong... and if I realise that I have misguidedly tried to link to one of these words then I make it into a redirect because it's not a rare mistake. On the other hand, there's not much point in redirecting more than half of the misspellings or it'll get too confusing. Someone once suggested a special type of redirect ''misspelling of'' that would differentiate between alternative names for something (like Alexandre Dumas and Alexander Dumas) and misspellings (margarine and margerine - one of my most-confused words...).
The problem here is figuring out what the common misspellings and typos are, and which can be misspellings for two or more equally reasonable encyclopedia entries. (My first typing of this sentence read "fro two or more"--we don't want to redirect real words because they can also be typos.) It's not safe to assume that my typos or common errors are globally common: I always get "weird" right, but for years typed "frined" more often than "friend." I don't think either of these is true in general.
Suggestion: before setting up a misspelling redirect, people should (a) google or otherwise check to make sure that the misspelling of their desired word A isn't a real word B that we're likely to want an entry on, and (b) check to make sure that the target of the redirect exists.