Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com wrote:
Muke Tever wrote:
In the US, and probably in other places where spelling is not phonetic, one of the most common uses for a dictionary (if not the most common) is to find what the correct spelling of a word is. If there is not "spell check" in the form of redirects or see-unders, then the Wiktionary is useless for this.
When a word is correctly spelled in several ways, every alternative is as good as the other and deserve its own article. It should therefore be abundantly clear that they are correct. As a consequence of the massive rename action many thousands of redirects have been created words like "Lightbulb" are now correct because there is a redirect ?? So the spelling of a sentence like: "A Lightbulb Is Typically Found In A Lamp." is apparantly correct?? I think not.
Capitalization is separate from spelling (though both are parts of orthography). Your sentence is spelled correctly, though capitalized unusually.
In any case, free capitalization of words is quite common--it occur in titles of works ("Antique Lightbulbs of the Early 19th Century"), in advertising ("Save Today on Great Unbeatable Prices"), in any case where a word is given a special kind of emphasis ("it wasn't just a smell, it was a Smell"), is used as a title of address ("you're not listening to me, Mother"), is made into a proper noun ("he was a Zealot"), etc., and formerly also optionally of nouns in general.
One of the most venerated documents in our country begins: We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquillity, provide for the common defence [sic], promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
The only words never take normal capitalization are those that are decreed to be so from technical context, such as "pH" or 'sinensis' in "Alligator sinensis."
On these grounds first-letter case-folding should never have been turned off; but, since it has been so done, redirects from capitalized forms should ALWAYS exist, because all other words may be found either capitalized or not capitalized, and a user, seeing an unfamiliar capitalized word in a text, does not know whether it is properly capitalized or not (and here we come again to the problem of users going to the dictionary to ascertain a word's orthography, and the need for redirects to establish same).
In other words I think the whole move was nonsense, but you already knew that.
Redirects are not an appropriate tool for spell checks.
Then what do you suggest would replace it, so the dictionary can be useful?
*Muke!