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

Sat Sep 14 16:57:11 UTC 2002

On Fri, Sep 13, 2002 at 04:45:48PM -0700, lcrocker at nupedia.com wrote:
> > There are some typos and common spelling mistakes which are
> > no-brainers to catch and fix, but require a lot of grunt work.
> > 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?

Why doesn't someone just add a function, that before
submitting every article/change, it runs a spell checker, writes
all the ``mistakes'' and possible ``corrections'' along with
an editable field of the article bellow. This way the editor
can see his/her mistakes and correct them very easily.

Note that I don't propose anything like:
,,You have written 'recieve', would you like to
change it [Y/N]'', but rather a _list_ off
all the mistakes displayed at once. Thus
you don't _have_to_ make some extra effort,
it just helps you to realize that this
and that word may be bogus.

Something like:

	recieve => receive, ...
	interestig => interesting, ...
	etc.

	<field for editing article>

	[preview] [submit]

I think it could also correct all the mistakes
at majority of the pages very quickly since
with _every_ edit, the person who is editing
is noticed about these possible problems.
(But I'm sure it wouldn't work if you only
add a button ``spell-checking'', you have to
display it _every_ time!) The editor can use his
own judgement to decide to fix it or not. The server
load is not so heavy, because there are not so much
submits and these are distributed through all the day.
For me, that seems better than some one-time massive
corrections. Use ispell/aspell or something.

Btw., thanx you all for Wikipedia!
Hynek