Rather than having a developer suddenly go ahead now and toggle some switch, our next step should be to consider haw we can implement this in a project that already contains nearly 60,000 articles in its principle namespace with minimized disruption.
OK - this would mean some organisation - how many active editors are there? Do you have the possibility to mail all people who inserted their e-mail address?
Otherwise you need to use the message that is shown on every page until work is over (this will maybe need some more time, but it works as well).
You need to create a wordlist with all words in it.
You need to create a page with "words to be checked" and one with "words to be devided" (for people who ave difficulties in this).
The page with "all words" may not be a category or simply the all words list - it must be a page where you can insert and delete the single words (it should be possible to be able to create the list froma dump).
Who contributes simply takes the words he is "moving" (working on) off the list - the admins have enough work with deleting all the re-directs (or is there a way to do this automatically) maybe modifying the page and writing "to be deleted" instead of the re-direct?
Anyone should be asked to do at least 10 words a day - if 2000 editors help: this is an effort of three days with 60000 words.
Ciao, Sabine