[WikiEN-l] Adolph Hitler

Fri Nov 14 19:26:02 UTC 2003

J. Noel Chiappa wrote:

>     > From: Fred Bauder <fredbaud at ctelco.net>
>
>     >> I don't think we need to record misspellings, otherwise we can get
>     >> stuck up with every variant typo, incl. Jospeh Goebbels.
>
>     > If a misspelling gets 70,000 hits on Google it deserves a brief 
> mention.
>
> No, if a mis-spelling gets 70,000 hits it deserves a *redirect*. A name
> variant only deserves a mention in the article if it's one that people
> actually consciously use (e.g. Rameses/Ramesses).

70,000 hits + multiple appearances in print authorities should get a mention
in the article ("commonly seen as Adolph, although technically incorrect").
Wikipedia should address frequent errors, not try to pretend they don't
happen.  That doesn't mean all errors need this treatment - for instance,
"Adlof Hitler" gets 310 hits, but I'll be so bold as to say there is not 
a single
person in the world that would consider this to be anything but a typo;
indeed, even Google's software automatically offers me to search on the
corrected name.

Stan