Nicolas Weeger wrote:
I disagree
that correcting spelling errors in principle is a bad idea
because articles are not finished. This is nonsense, articles on
wikipedia are never finished - that doesn't mean they should contain
spelling errors.
There is nothing wrong with correcting the spelling in
unfinished
articles, but as a matter of courtesy when a person is obviously
continuing his work in such an article I would give him the time to
finish his work before I tried to change it. Still. I see this as a
secondary point in Adam's concerns.,
You're
right however on the spelling bots: These things are
dangerous, and should be avoided. Fixing spelling errors on wikipedia
is a massive task. Either we disallow bots for this purpose or we
introduce a guideline that each spelling error has to have been
looked at by the person running the bot first, and then approved for
editing by the bot. I know that this is not directly enforceable, but
most policies on wikipedia are not. If someone makes a "spelling
correction" with a bot where the spelling was correct in the context,
that shows that they have not actually looked at that particular
instance. Appropriate measures can then be taken. WDYT?
I don't know how hard that'd be, but couldn't the bots ignore (just
report) mispelled words between quotes? ''like that'' or
"that"?
If the mispelling (talking about common mistakes here, like taht, not
words which can have different spelling/meanings :) is intended, it is
probably meaning something, so the word or expression is probably
emphazised (hum, what's the spelling? :)) to show, in the article
itself, that the mispelling IS intended.
It's not just the typos and misspellings that are at issue. One also
needs to consider variant spellings. The difference between British and
American spellings is perhaps the most obvious example of that.
Spelling bots are often rooted in one or the other spelling, and when
they start changing alternative spellings it leaves people needlessly
annoyed. Spelling bots that do not require human intervention should be
completely outlawed.
Ec