I shamefully admit to mistyping "seperate" on occasions. Funny thing is I spell it correctly in longhand. Unfortunately I have very lazy fingers which find hitting "e" twice easier. :( could we add "it's" to the 3-letter words we can search for? That's a *very* common error. Derek Ross wrote:

Brion I'll add this to the Useful Database queries stuff I'm building on MetaWikipedia, ta. Steve Callaway ----- Original Message ----- From: "Brion VIBBER" <brion(a)pobox.com> To: <wikipedia-l(a)nupedia.com> Sent: Sunday, October 20, 2002 2:33 AM Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] Mispeelings

tarquin wrote: All!!!??? Some how changing the song title to "It is a Long Way to Tipperary" doesn't seem right to me :-( Eclecticology

Ray Saintonge wrote: I wasn't planning on changing *quoted* text. :-) rather than a letter omitted, psychological texts could end up talking about people with annual retentive personalities. The upshot is that this feature is very useful but careful human checking is required!

|From: Toby Bartels <toby+wikipedia(a)math.ucr.edu> |Content-Disposition: inline |Sender: wikipedia-l-admin(a)nupedia.com |Reply-To: wikipedia-l(a)nupedia.com |Date: Mon, 21 Oct 2002 00:02:46 -0700 | |tarquin wrote: | |>If we change all "it's" to either "its" or the more formal "it is", then |>that list will gradually diminish. | |So we're at the point now where it's been suggested |to remove a word ("it's") entirely from Wikipedia |because it's difficult to tell when it's misspelled? |This is far more zealous than we need to be. |Correct them when you find them, but don't go overboard -- |they're just mispeelings! | | |-- Toby I guess I'll need to explain this. There are two words with the letter sequence I T S. One is the contraction of "it is" and is marked by an apostrophe ('), between the T and the S. The other is a possessive pronoun and has no apostrophe. Since many forms of the possessive end with an apostrophe and an S, some people write "it's" for the possessive form when they should have written "its". Likewise, although more rarely, some people write "its" when they should have written "it's". There is no "mispelling" involved in this error and there is no way in hell any computer program in SQL can tell the difference between these two frequently confused forms and correct the error. Tom Parmenter Ortolan88

Toby Bartels wrote: Sheesh. Yet another minor issue that blows out of all proportion -- can we drop it now? If I were going on a hunt for incorrect uses of "it's", correcting most to "its" or "it is" has the advantage of shortening the next list of search results. I certainly wasn't suggesting changing "it's a long way to tipperary". I can't speak for AmEnglish, but in BrEnglish, a contraction such as "it's" is considered a little too informal for a work such as an encyclopedia or a dictionary. Perhaps it was UK-centric of me to assume that that holds in AmEng too, in which case I apologize (but note that many US wikipedians could do with a healthy dose of culture shock to shake a few us-centric attitudes.)