[Wikipedia-l] Common typos

Sat Sep 14 08:16:17 UTC 2002

lcrocker at nupedia.com wrote:

>>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? 
>>
>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.
>
>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 your point.
I was thinking of something that only tackles one particular 
mis-spelling at a time, and not a full spell-checker for that reason; 
but I see that even a batch replace of all "recieve" could break things 
like:
'a common misspelling of "receive" is "recieve"'
'Recieve is a city in Brazil" (a feasible typo for Recife)
and so on.

Something that gives a list of, say 10 occurences, with context, and 
asks for check-box confirmation of each one might be okay -- but I think 
it should search for only one particular mis-spelt word.
Overall, the task of checking spelling and grammar has to be a human one.