[Wikipedia-l] Common typos (was: Tucci528)

[elian]

lcrocker at nupedia.com writes:

> > 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?  Obviously, this will deal with only a
> > fraction of the overall typo checking, since many things depend
> > on context (eg "its" / "it's").
...

> I think it should be a general policy that we should not allow
> any automatic process to alter content.  The value of Wikipedia
> is that real human beings with understanding and judgment have
> edited the pages.

ACK.

> What if there were a page about common English mispellings
> that had "recieve" there intentionally?  Or perhaps it could
> be someone's name, or a foreign word used in context.  I
> remember having a Vietnames co-worker named "Teh" who was
> constantly running into the problem of spell checkers changing
> his name to "The".

I see the problem, but imagine this like a search and
replace function in a texteditor: I usually don't hit "replace all", but
look at every particular instance and decide, if it should be replaced.

And something like this, if used in a responsible way (maybe only by
admins) would be a very valuable tool for the wikipedia.

So imagine a list of search results, all showing a few lines a content
around to decide if it's a mispelling (and a link to the article if this
is not enough information for you), and a checkbox beside each result to
include it in the replace or not. All still depends on human judgement,
but facilitates the editing a lot.

greetings, sorry for the bad english
elian
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