Howdy,
I'd like to add a spell checker to MediaWiki using the pspell library.
(Pspell
is part of php and it uses libaspell.) It doesn't help that I'm new to the
MediaWiki code base and PHP isn't exactly my favorite language. (I wouldn't
even call it my _third_ favorite.) Anyway, I'd like to get a little feedback
and advice on where to go from here.
I know a few people have proposed working on spell check before:
http://mail.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2004-March/021358.html
But, as best I can tell no one has gone anywhere. Does anyone know what
happened to User:Archivist's spellchecker?
Right now I have a proof-of-concept running on my computer. You can see it
at
http://66.205.125.240/spell/index.php/Special:Spellcheck/Main_Page
It is a SpecialPage that reads the article from the database, spell checks
it,
lets the user choose the words from the drop-down box, and then sends a
FauxRequest to EditPage. Eventually I'd like to add it to EditPage, but I
started out with a special page so that I did not have to deal with the
complexity of EditPage.
Here's how I'd like the final version to work:
# There's a button at the bottom of an EditPage beside 'Show Perview' and
'Show
Changes' labeled 'Spell Check'.
# When the user clicks 'Spell Check', they get a preview of their edit where
misspelled words are replaced with drop-down boxes.
# The user changes the words they think are mispelled to one of the
suggestions
or leaves it as is. When they click 'Show Preview', they go back to the
preview page.
A few questions:
Do I not need to deal with multi-byte character functions like mb_substr
since
all the languages use utf-8?
Should the user spell check a preview or the wikitext?
If a word is misspelled in several places, should the user be asked once for
the word or should the user be asked everytime the word appears?
Thanks,
Jeff McGee