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Archive 1Archive 2Archive 3Archive 4Archive 5

Adopt a Typo

I don't know if this is a stupid idea or not but what if we got everyone to adopt a typo by choosing like 5 or 6 of the most widely used typo's on the common list and search Wikipedia for them. I've been monitoring articles that use aquired, anounced, and acheived. It took a while to get rid of the old articles, but now all I do is scan for new articles with that mistake. If we got a lot of members in on it we could probably get it to work. Some typos aren't used that often so it would be really easy just to check for any recent articles using that typo. What do you guys think? DeluxNate (talk) 18:30, 23 July 2008 (UTC)

I think we do this anyway, surely? I certainly use WP:AWB every now and then to seek out "could of", "is been" and a few others and fix them. PamD (talk) 07:19, 28 July 2008 (UTC)
It's a very good idea. On my user page, I've created links that search for certain common mispellings I've fixed in the past. Every now and then I just click on them to fix the new ones. I refer people to my user page to figure out how to make those kinds of links. Jason Quinn (talk) 00:18, 29 July 2008 (UTC)
A VERY good idea! I adopted 'questionnaire' so often misspelled with a single 'n'. After several heavy copy sessions I have AT LAST got on top of the backlog. Now I shall simply check every so often. --SciHound (talk) 15:30, 16 June 2010 (UTC)

Project

Should the team page for your project be located at Wikipedia:WikiProject Typo or something similar? Just a question, no malice intended. (And I don't know if it really matters!) the_ed17 23:52, 27 July 2008 (UTC)

I just asked about the team page name up in the "Name of the main project page" heading. Maybe there's some policy regarding team names. Not sure. I hope not because "Wikipedia:Typo Team" sounds cool. I am very close to just changing our project page to "Wikipedia:Typo Team" because "Wikipedia:Typo" doesn't really make sense. Nor would "Wikipedia:WikiProject Typo Team". I need to worry about if the move would break userboxes before I actually do the change so I haven't made it yet. Jason Quinn (talk) 00:17, 29 July 2008 (UTC)

Moved to Wikipedia:Typo Team. Call to change userbox and for barnstar

Since enough time has past and nobody else commented, I went ahead and moved the project page to the new name. Things mostly seems to have gone smoothly. There was a little bit of trouble with the archive on the discussion page but I fixed it now too I think. Hopefully there hasn't been any more consequences I didn't anticipate. There are two more things I think the project should do. Copy Galaxiaad's userbox to the project box such that we have something like Wikipedia:Typo team/userbox or thing like that. This would make the project feel more formal. And secondly, I think it would be great if the project had a barnstar to give to users. I have zero artistic ability (and suspect that many of us are very left-brained people) but if you can design a good one it would be cool for us to have. Jason Quinn (talk) 17:52, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

I asked the Wikipedia:WikiProject Wikipedia Awards to create us a barnstar. They suggested to use {{subst:The Copyeditor's Barnstar|message ~~~~}} whenever we need one which gives the user this barnstar:

The Copyeditor's Barnstar
The current most appropriate big barnstar but copyediting is much more than just typos so isn't always appropriate. Jason Quinn (talk) 17:32, 30 January 2009 (UTC)

It works but I still think it would be cool to have our own. The other standard choice is the minor barnstar {{subst:The Minor Barnstar|message ~~~~}} which results in

The Minor Barnstar
The current most appropriate barnstar but too small for my liking. Jason Quinn (talk) 17:32, 30 January 2009 (UTC)

but calling someone's effort's minor even when they are big feels wrong. Maybe it's just me. Jason Quinn (talk) 17:32, 30 January 2009 (UTC)


I designed two barnstars that we could possibly use. Sophus Bie (talk) 03:26, 9 February 2009 (UTC)
I made them into templates:
The Typo Team Barnstar
{{{1}}}
The Typo Team Medal
{{{1}}}
The code for them is {{subst:Typo Team Barnstar|message ~~~~}} and {{subst:Typo_Team_Medal|message ~~~~}}, respectively. Does anyone know whether it would be more appropriate to file them under Wikipedia:Barnstar or Wikipedia:Awards_by_WikiProject? Sophus Bie (talk) 02:26, 11 February 2009 (UTC)
plus Added to Wikipedia:Barnstars. (lol, yes.. just now.. two years later. Sorry!!) -- œ™ 14:38, 6 August 2011 (UTC)

Question About Misspelling Lists

Is there a reason why dozens of the words in Wikipedia:Lists of common misspellings are in the format [ misspelled word] (correct word) in plain text rather than linked text that allows a search (for example, see [ challanger] (challenger))? The misspelled word almost always has a space in front of it as well. I realize that in some cases, the search may have resulted in many false positives, but not in all cases. As a newbie, I may be missing something obvious, but thought I would ask. Thanks. JimVC3 (talk) 18:21, 27 October 2008 (UTC)

Question about Misspellings in Titles

Does anyone know if there is a way to correct a clear misspelling in a Title? I was looking up misspellings of "Cambridge" and found "Cambrige High School" in the title, where the school is clearly referred to as "Cambridge" in the content. When I went to edit page, the title is not editable. What is the protocol about this? Thanks for any help. Aclayartist (talk) 14:46, 31 October 2008 (UTC)

You need to move the page. See Help:Moving a page for details. --Zundark (talk) 15:07, 31 October 2008 (UTC)

Moved to subpages, TypoScan project, misc.

I hope I didn't cause any disruption but I moved Wikipedia:Typo Team/works completed and its and archives and Wikipedia:Typo Team/pledges to subpages. This makes logical sense and also keeps our project and its pages easily locatable using the subpage search. Speaking of which, while I was browsing all our project subpages, I found another typo project called Wikipedia:TypoScan. Just thought I'd mention it in case you are interested. I also put a link to it on our project page.

If you find any problems associated with my page moves, let me know. Our project is fairly low-key but I have noticed all the efforts being put in especially by some members. You can tell we get a lot done by how much our works completed archive has grown recently!

I've slowly been mulling some new ideas. As I've mentioned before, it'd be good if we got ourselves a barnstar. It'd also be good to get Galaxiaad's userbox out of user space so people could use code like {{user typoteam}} for the user box. This looks more formal and I think would help us. Another thing I am slowly working on is a "calling all arms"-style template to put on the project page. This would be good for those really nasty typos that have 100s or even 1000s of instances and it's too big or too tedious a job for just one member to fix. I recently fixed many instances of "wresting" for "wrestling", which was nasty because "wresting" is also a valid word so every edit had to be carefully read for context. My idea is that we collaborate to tackle beasts such as these. Jason Quinn (talk) 21:38, 11 January 2009 (UTC)

WordNet limitations?

I cannot understand: but hits from Princeton University's WordNet should be checked against other dictionaries

This is not mentioned in WordNet or WordNet limitations — why is it included here?

Please excuse me if this sounds personal, but I have used WordNet for several years, local and Web versions, without a problem. - Mitch3000 00:22, 16 January 2009 (UTC)

I'm pleased to announce that you are now the official Typo Team WordNet expert! -wink- Be bold. Jason Quinn (talk) 15:54, 17 January 2009 (UTC)

Center around

I don't know if this is the right place to post, but I found that there are more than 40,000 pages with the phrase 'center around' and its relatives (centering around, etc). How is is possible to change them to the correct 'center on', or other phrases with correct English (relate to, concern, etc)? Northfox (talk) 05:15, 29 December 2008 (UTC)

I don't know if it's possible or desirable to program a bot to change that, so you'll probably have to do it manually, one at a time. But of course, you only have to change it in article space, not on talk pages, etc. Don't forget to check for the British spelling "centre around, centring around", etc. —Angr 10:58, 29 December 2008 (UTC)

Something that has plagued the pages of assorted pages, and is far too widespread to append across the board, is the usage of the word 'alternatives'. The word does not exist in the English language and is derived from the Latin 'alter' meaning 'other one of two'. Therefore you can only ever have one alternative. Perhaps more strict controls on the basics of the English language should be put in place before this becomes the fountain of knowledge that it's intended to be. - Matsuguri

as much as I agree with you, Webster online dictionary defines 'alternative' as one of two or more. Thus the plural would be justified. [1]. Northfox (talk) 01:54, 12 January 2009 (UTC)
Meanwhile Dictionary.com [2] has a lengthy paragraph explaining that the use of 'alternatives' is incorrect. - Matsuguri
No, it has a lengthy paragraph explaining that some traditionalists don't like the use of the word "alternative" where there are three or more choices. Even traditionalists wouldn't object to a reference to "two alternatives". —Angr 12:13, 12 January 2009 (UTC)
Yes it does. It states that there is a usage for alternatives, and that popular culture has allowed this to prosper, but 51% of it's Usage Board disagree with such a usage. - Matsuguri
But it never says the plural "alternatives" is wrong, nor does it say what you claim above, that "you can only ever have one alternative". Rather, it says some people say you can only have exactly two alternatives. —Angr 23:00, 12 January 2009 (UTC)
I think you mean one alternative. Remember, the alternative is the other choice from the one you are presented with. You can always have two or more options, but alternatives is a word that does not, and indeed should not, exist. The paragraph supports this with the majority supporting that the use of 'alternatives' is incorrect as regards it's linguistic roots and meaning. - Matsuguri
The OED2 defines 'alternative' as "Of two things: Such that one or the other may be chosen, the choice of either involving the rejection of the other. (Sometimes of more than two.)" It gives the 19th-c examples "I feel bound to recapitulate the alternative possibilities" and "I accept the statements as alternative statements", where 'alternatives' would be elliptical, and from the 20th c "Faced with these four alternatives, he chose the third." Elsewhere I find the phrases—in the OED's own definitions!—of "an accordance with one of two or more alternatives". In exemplar quotations, you find things like "In addition to such simple allelomorphs, however, particular loci in scores of species show whole series of alternatives, multiple allelomorphs as they are called", "It turns out that these two alternatives (known as ‘allotypic’ alternatives) behave as genetic alleles", "a choice between two unilocal alternatives, the one uxorilocal ... and the other virilocal", "The surprising thing about pile and reactor is that only a few alternatives have ever been used for them:" [they list three] And that's just some of the tokens in lemmas starting with 'A'. kwami (talk) 22:27, 22 January 2009 (UTC)
Language is not static. Jason Quinn (talk) 00:21, 7 March 2009 (UTC)

Searches for misspelled words

Up until about the beginning of 2009, wiki would update searches for misspelled words so that they more or less disappear once corrected.

Unfortunately, this gobbled up a lot of CPU resources.

So wiki was changed so that searches for misspelled words are updated once per day.

Depending on which time zone you are in, this means that it might take two days for a misspelling to disappear when corrected.

My suggestion is that wiki update misspellings twice per day so that a misspelling disappears hopefully overnight no matter where the corrector lives. Tabletop (talk) 06:37, 11 April 2009 (UTC)

Using Bots

Would using bots for fixing typos be a good idea? I would use Autowikibrowser, but I use a Mac, and it says it only works for Windows. I really want to fix all of the places where people spelled "definitely" incorrectly, but there are, as I am typing this, 2,820 places where people spelled it incorrectly, and I don't have that much time. Hi878 (talk) 00:52, 13 May 2009 (UTC)

Bots may have trouble NOT correcting deliberate errors (sometimes marked with [sic]); surnames such as Ballance (not balance); foreign words; etc. A bot that finds an occurance of a particular word, shows some contect and asks a human for confirmation would be safer. Tabletop (talk) 10:46, 13 May 2009 (UTC)
How might I go about creating such a bot? Hi878 (talk) 16:53, 13 May 2009 (UTC)
Give the bot a mispelled word to search for, say "ecxept".
List the first page with an occurance of that misspelled word together with some context (a line before and after).
You might list the next 10 or 20 occurances like the existing search function.
Ask if you want to edit that word (Y/N) and if yes go and edit that page that contains that mispelled word. If no skip to next misspelled word.
Load the edit summary with a suitable string such as "Respell ecxept => except". (That saves some effort).
When finished with that page, go to the next occurance of that misspelled work.
Display the number of occurances of that misspelled word, which helps determine if the word is truely misspelled.
A low count tends to indicates that is is probably misspelled.

Edit Summary?

If I made a typo in an edit summary, how can it be corrected? --MartinezMD (talk) 01:43, 23 May 2009 (UTC)

Good question! Tabletop (talk) 07:20, 23 May 2009 (UTC)
As far as I know, you can't correct an edit summary. JimVC3 (talk) 18:17, 23 May 2009 (UTC)
Is this by design or simply never considered? Any upper level admins have an official answer because I have a few of my own I'd like to fix?--MartinezMD (talk) 14:46, 24 May 2009 (UTC)
You cannot correct an edit summary. I wouldn't worry about them too much. It happens but it's not worth losing sleep over. In theory, an administrator could edit the database entry corresponding to the edit, so it's not impossible; but allowing users to do this would be a terrible burden. Allowing users to do it would make edit histories potentially very confusing (if people abused the feature). Jason Quinn (talk) 23:49, 2 May 2010 (UTC)

Bot to list low frequency words.

A bot is needed to do the following:

Very low frequency words are often spelling errors, and perticulary hard to find errors at that.

Consider:

  • ecxept => except (2)
  • guage => gauge (40)
  • specail => special (7)
  • unfied => unified (6)
  • unform => uniform (10)


  • except (80869)
  • gauge (15306)
  • special (190807)
  • unified (17972)
  • uniform ((33297)


  • staton (407) => station (7); => Staton (400) surname to be left unchanged.
  • careeer => career (7) but the count is (76440) due to spurious matches.
  • fo (4192) => of; are 99% false matches such .fo Faroe Islands; say we check matches 1-100; next time we would like to check matches 101-200; however the Wikipedia search function has no command to jump to match 200. (There was something like this, but the someone changed the search function and deleted it!)


See how the misspellings have very frequencies, while the correct spellings have large frequencies. Note that some words make false matches.

In order to find words quickly, wikipedia would already have lists of words in alphabetical order (which seem to be updated about daily), and the database software ought to be able to generate a sorted frequency count fairly easily.

Such low frequency misspellings should not be compiled into lists by hand, a bot could do the job say once per month, allowing these errors to be quickly eliminated.

Over to you. Tabletop (talk) 07:55, 23 May 2009 (UTC)

New banner

I've made a Wikipedia ad banner for the project, and I've added it to the project page. If anyone doesn't like it, feel free to kick me in the shin.

Wikipedia ad for Wikipedia:Typo Team
Wikipedia adsfile info – #180

Sophus Bie (talk) 13:44, 10 June 2009 (UTC)

As long as you have a misspelled word on the first page, I suggest you keep misspelling words on the succeeding pages until you get to the end. Just a suggesstion (!). Sincerely, GeorgeLouis (talk) 22:35, 22 June 2009 (UTC)
Oh dear, I feel dumb. Fixed it. Sophus Bie (talk) 00:02, 26 June 2009 (UTC)
Gee, I thought it was kind of funny the first way. Why not put an error on every page -- except maybe the last one. You know, misteaks, somethign, etc. Seriously, a little humor would be, well, humanizing. Sincerely, GeorgeLouis (talk) 16:41, 26 June 2009 (UTC)
I agree, it would be funny. You could actually display the slide with the error and segue to the fixed version such that it appeared to fix itself. (Don't feel dumb—see Muphry's law.) --Milkbreath (talk) 19:09, 28 July 2009 (UTC)
Of course, now that I've gotten some time to do that, I've discovered that I've lost the source file-- go figure... Sophus Bie (talk) 10:37, 9 August 2009 (UTC)

Scan or peruse?

"The bottom line is that the edit summaries are important and other editors value them when scanning the article history." Don't we want peruse here, since scan also means to read quickly? Yours, GeorgeLouis (talk) 22:29, 22 June 2009 (UTC)

Don't forgot the Wikipedia motto, "Be bold.". ;-) Jason Quinn (talk) 18:59, 12 August 2009 (UTC)

Née? Nay, I say.

The OED has "née" as the entry word and calls it not fully Anglicized, but practically every other dictionary shows "nee" as an alternate spelling if not as the entry word. And it's not unusual for the massive OED to lag a bit when it comes to usage. "Nee" is a perfectly legitimate and correct spelling and does not need to be corrected to the Frenchified form. We should leave whichever form we find so as not to annoy poeple like me who are bugged by hypercorrection. --Milkbreath (talk) 19:05, 28 July 2009 (UTC)

"Bicep"

One task I've given myself is to correct every occurrence of bicep - the incorrect pseudo-singular form of biceps. However, when I try searching for "bicep" it also finds all occurrences of "biceps" which makes the task quite difficult. Is it possible to do it using the internal search engine, or am I doomed to Google tricks for this? arny (talk) 13:24, 3 August 2009 (UTC)

Try this "bicep" -biceps. The minus can be used to exclude matches. Plastikspork (talk) 05:07, 4 August 2009 (UTC)
Thank you for the tip (and sorry I responded quite a bit too late). Arny (talk) 09:35, 20 July 2011 (UTC)

Advertisment

Did you know just how many articles have the word 'advertisment'? There is also acommodation and even accomodation. I've even corrected a 'numbet'! Thanks a lot for the person who founded this thing! Kayau Wuthering Heights VANITY FAIR paradise lost 10:45, 6 August 2009 (UTC)

Word count updates

Originally wiki updated the word count of say spelling errors as soon as they were correct.

Then wiki was modified to update the word count what appears to be once per day.

Now wiki updates the word count even less frequently, possibly not at all.

Can we go back to updating the word count twice per day.

The word count is listed on the top right corner of the page when you search for a word, whether a spelling error or not.

For example, "repubican" was misspelled 19 times a few days ago, but most ocurrances have been corrected so that the count should be down to about 5.

Tabletop (talk) 04:19, 14 August 2009 (UTC)

Are you asking for an update to frequency with which the wikipedia search database/cache is updated? If so, you might want to ask at WP:VPT. Plastikspork (talk) 16:53, 14 August 2009 (UTC)
Currently the word-frequency-count seems to be updated every few days. It would be helpful if it were updated twice per day to suit editors in different time zones. Tabletop (talk) 01:48, 15 September 2009 (UTC)

Academic Journals Typo Cleanup

See Wikipedia:WikiProject_Academic_Journals/Journals_cited_by_Wikipedia/Typos. I don't really know what to say, so if you have questions, just ask and I'll answer as best I can. Headbomb {ταλκκοντριβς – WP Physics} 22:50, 25 August 2009 (UTC)

Any problem with Republic of Salé?

Current spelling of "Salè" is hopelessly wrong (though with some web occurrences). Academic spelling is Salé, as shown for instance in:

P. M. Holt,Ann K. S. Lambton,Bernard Lewis (1977). The Cambridge History of Islam, Volume 2. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9780521291378.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link), 248.

For more sources and discussions, please refer to corresponding Talk page ("Requested move"). And we want to make absolutely sure that the new title won't be challenged later on. Thanks. --Azurfrog (talk) 08:23, 1 May 2010 (UTC)

stomache

[3]

Added to AWB common misspellings then occurrences fixed. Regards, SunCreator (talk) 15:04, 5 May 2010 (UTC)

How to find typos?

Typos are notoriously hard to find in Wikipedia. Please give me suggestions on how to find typos. I am currently clicking on random articles and using ieSpell to check for typos.--I am a violinist (talk) 12:06, 14 May 2010 (UTC)

Hi, I am a violinist. Each member of the Typo Team likely has honed their own way of searching for typos. Probably the most common is to systematically check for given misspellings using the "search" feature on Wikipedia. I just realized that the new Vector style that went active yesterday lacks the "Go"/"Search" options that the old Monobook style had. This is a shame for our project because the "search" feature was very valuable, allowing one to find all occurrences of a word without being redirected to an article. However, if you purposely search for some misspelled word, you will get a specialized search page. That page does not automatically direct you to an article regardless of the search term. So using a list such as Wikipedia:Lists of common misspellings and this special search page, you can find many typos to fix. There are also bots that can help you edit but I'm not really too familiar with them and will leave that for somebody else's input. Cheers, Jason Quinn (talk) 16:22, 14 May 2010 (UTC)
I would not agree that typos are hard to find, not yet anyhow. If you looking a good place is the Links to the lists in Wikipedia:Lists of common misspellings. Regards, SunCreator (talk) 15:58, 24 May 2010 (UTC)

Need some advice/guidance on typos within redirects

Greetings, everyone.

I've been searching WP articles for occurrences of the typo "univeristy" and have found about 100, roughly half of which are simply redirects to an article on a particlur educational institution (e.g., "Cornell Univeristy" redirects to "Cornell University"). It seems to me that this particular group of redirects is unnecessary and should be removed; if we wanted WP to be consistent, then we should have similar "univeristy" redirects for the hundreds (thousands?) of other universities around the world. And, if we did that, then the next logical step would be to also create (and maintain!) redirects for misspellings like "univerity", "universty", and "univesity" etc., ad infinitum. That doesn't seem very realistic, but that's just my opinion; I could be wrong.

I can certainly see the need for a situation where, for example, "Saint Joseph Hospital at Creighton University Medical Center" redirects from "Creighton University College of Nursing", but not an additional one from "Creighton Univeristy College of Nursing". In that minority of cases, rather than removing the redirect, I would suggest simply correcting the typo within the redirect.

If appropriate, I'd be happy to do the legwork I've proposed, but I'd like to get consensus first. Please post your responses here; I'll be watching the page for updates and am looking forward to reading your comments and suggestions.

Thanks and have a nice day,

Bgpaulus (talk) 15:36, 19 May 2010 (UTC)

I have thought about this situation before. I think that the best solution is to leave most redirects alone, especially in an instance like "univeristy". Having a mis-spelling-based redirect deleted requires the spelling to be "implausible". Creating a spelling-based redirect requires the misspelling to be "likely". Both words are subjective. Always having or always not having a redirect for articles does not follow from these terms because they should be interpreted in terms of absolute usage, not relative. For instance, a redirect for "Cornell Univeristy" may be a very popular search that a redirect might on average help 10000 people a year, while a redirect for "Singapore Management Univeristy" might help only 1 person per year. The frequency of making the spelling mistake is probably the same for both but in terms of absolute usage, they are very different. Is it worth the overload to add redirects for such infrequently used situations? Probably not. Is it worth having it for the frequently used case? Probably. Basically, having a misspelling-based redirect is a judgment call. Most of the time, if somebody was bothered enough by a misspelling to create a redirect, I think it is okay to leave it be. Blanket fixing all is a can of worms, as is deleting all. Jason Quinn (talk) 16:39, 19 May 2010 (UTC)
I agree, if there was a redirect created it has probably been misspelled enough times to need a redirect. Like February often being spelled Febuary. Sign My Guestbook! User:Sumsum2010 23:38, 19 May 2010 (UTC)
Redirects for misspelling are good. Redirects are cheap and you cannot assume the visitor to Wikipedia is well educated. Visitors can be uneducated, have learning issues, not speak English etc. For all these reasons creating redirects are good. Redirects for misspelling can be indicated with {{R from misspelling}}. Regards, SunCreator (talk) 16:09, 24 May 2010 (UTC)

British/American English spell checker

I've been asked in a FAC to check the article for inconsistent use of US/UK spelling. Is there an automated tool which can do this for me? bamse (talk) 20:03, 24 May 2010 (UTC)

Any good spellchecker should allow you to select an WP:ENGVAR and then check spelling with respect to that English variation. I know when I open up an edit window, the browser highlights all misspellings, which includes such variations, since I have selected a particular English variation. There is also User:Ohconfucius/EngvarB, which is an attempt to script the replacement of such words. Is this particular article supposed to be in British or American English? Plastikspork ―Œ(talk) 21:32, 24 May 2010 (UTC)
Thanks for the reply. Let's say (don't really care) the article should be in American English. I installed the EngvarB script but can't figure out how to use it. At User:Ohconfucius/EngvarB it says: "this script has two buttons", but I don't see any buttons. Where are they? bamse (talk) 08:01, 25 May 2010 (UTC)
I haven't tried it yet. I believe it only changes from American into British at the moment, unless I am reading the documentation incorrectly. After you install it, you will have to reload the cache (ctrl R on Firefox, something else on other browsers). The buttons will most likely be in the "toolbox" section on the left side of the screen. That is, unless he has put them somewhere else, like in the drop down menu at the top or something. I know the lightmouse script puts them in the toolbox. I could potentially help if you want American English, since I have that engvar currently installed on my computer, and my browser then highlights British spellings as incorrect. Plastikspork ―Œ(talk) 08:18, 25 May 2010 (UTC)
That would be great if you could make it American English. There shouldn't be too many British spellings in it. bamse (talk) 09:52, 25 May 2010 (UTC)
Feel free to leave a note at the nomination page after: "Check consistency of US vs UK spelling" or just here, if you decide to help. bamse (talk) 09:54, 25 May 2010 (UTC)
It appears that the article is mostly in UK English. So it would be easier to convert it that way. Sorry for the confusion. I'll try to contact User:Ohconfucius to see if I can make the script work. bamse (talk) 15:49, 25 May 2010 (UTC)
  • To the best of my knowledge, the script does work, but seem to run a bit slow. I have made some tweaks, and the user now has more options if indeed things get stuck. Any suggestions for speed gain would be much appreciated. Ohconfucius ¡digame! 02:28, 28 May 2010 (UTC)

Problem with Google spellchecker

I have the Google toolbar on both my work computer and my home computer. When I click on "ABC Check" (on either computer) while editing Wikipedia, all the lines appear one on top of the other, so they can't be read. This has only started happening in the past few months. Does anyone else have this problem or know how to fix it? Rick Norwood (talk) 12:51, 27 July 2010 (UTC)

Can I Join

Can I Join the Tpyo, Sorry Typo Team He He . Is there anything I need to do to join?

thanks
Thomas888b (talk) 10:53, 26 October 2010 (UTC)
There's nothing you need to do. Membership is self-labeled. I recommend reading the project page, WP:TYPO. Cheers, Jason Quinn (talk) 10:55, 26 October 2010 (UTC)

Spaces

Is a missing space considered a typo? For instance, before a full stop, before opening parenthesis and between quantity and unit. --Mortense (talk) 14:17, 14 November 2010 (UTC)

Ha, I like the speeling mistake in your question. But to answer your question, I would say that those are typos. However, finding them using the search box is a bit difficult. Plastikspork ―Œ(talk) 06:22, 15 November 2010 (UTC)
Fixed. --Mortense (talk) 11:50, 15 November 2010 (UTC)
Thanks for the answer. There are no bounds for the number of search terms when searching for those with continuous variables, but for instance googling for "OV" (including the quotes) can keep one occupied for a long time. Typically there are also plenty of misspelled units in those found articles. Otherwise, wouldn't it be feasible to download the Wikipedia data dump and run a script on it? (Feel free to point out further typos.) --Mortense (talk) 12:02, 15 November 2010 (UTC)

American States

Hey everyone! I've recently started a little task of correcting the spellings of US States in articles. I've been searching possible misspellings, such as New Jersy or Louisana, and correcting the entries that come up. Any help is appreciated!--Yaksar (let's chat) 07:46, 31 January 2011 (UTC)

"Exact Match" search? Pleeeeeeeeeeeeeeease!

Using the Lists of common misspellings, I am getting frustrated at scrolling through hundreds of pages of perfectly-correctly-spelled 'other words from stem', such as maintained, maintain, maintaining, when what I'm looking for is "maintainance" so's I can go fix it! Is there any way we can get an 'exact match' search going, to make lives easier for typo-fixers? It would make it much easier to correct far more typos in the time I have available! (ThatPeskyCommoner (talk) 10:15, 19 February 2011 (UTC))

Perhaps you would like to elaborate on the method you are using for search – Wikipedia, Google, something else? —Quibik (talk) 14:38, 19 February 2011 (UTC)

Using Wikipedia's Lists of common misspellings (by letter) (ThatPeskyCommoner (talk) 07:00, 20 February 2011 (UTC))

I see your problem now. Thanks. I have no idea how to make this work for Wikipedia search, but I suppose could do a Google search "site:en.wikipedia.org word"? —Quibik (talk) 10:33, 20 February 2011 (UTC)
We must have some techie-type who can tweak the search box? I had the same problem this morning finding misspellings of manage[insert ending here] words! So who knows a good techie-type they can bully coerce nudge into doing this for us? [grins] (ThatPeskyCommoner (talk) 12:48, 20 February 2011 (UTC))
Are you searching with double-quotes around the word(s)? A wiki search for "builting" with quotes returns four matches; leave the quotes off and it says there are 300,000. Only a few of the links at Lists of common misspellings (by letter) include the double quotes, sadly. -- John of Reading (talk) 12:55, 20 February 2011 (UTC)

Adopted

Would it be a good idea to have an adoptED typos page? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Bardi1100 (talk • contribs) 23:40, 13 April 2011 (UTC)

Earthern

From a site search, I notice that there are 51 occurrences of "earthern", which is (probably in all cases) a misspelling of earthen. It's not on Wikipedia:Lists of common misspellings/E. Looks to me like a job for someone with WP:AWB, but I couldn't see where to suggest it. --Chriswaterguy talk 11:01, 26 June 2011 (UTC)

 Done with AWB, changing to earth/earthen/earthenware/eastern as seemed best. Requests like this often get posted at Wikipedia:AutoWikiBrowser/Tasks. -- John of Reading (talk) 20:18, 26 June 2011 (UTC)
Nice work, thanks. --Chriswaterguy talk 09:50, 28 June 2011 (UTC)

Adopt-a-Typo Userbox

I made an adopt a typo userbox, anyone interested?

This user has adopted a typo
as his very own.
 Majestic PyreMy Speech Bubble  20:25, 5 August 2011 (UTC)
I like it! I've added it to the 'userbox' section of the project page, so that new typo team members will see it. Sophus Bie (talk) 05:31, 23 August 2011 (UTC)

Found some

Recently found and cleaned these using WP:AWB with Google search option. Just search for one word and AWB finds new typos in the articles your checking so add the new typo on and away you go. Kinda a fun way to do them. accomodate, acqusition, aditional, admited, annouced, approximatly, are are, attemps, availible, begining, betweem, cannnot, casetes, Celcius, civillians, commited, comunication, conlusion, continuos, controled, controll,diffrent, disapeared, disolved, distrubution, embarassingly, foward, immidiately, in it's, incorportaion, influencial, it's own, manuvering, politicial, posistions, presidental, prevelant, prominant, protrayed, reconnaisance, strugle, sucessfully, therfore, unconcious, united, Univeristy, were were. Regards, SunCreator (talk) 12:01, 11 September 2011 (UTC)

Not a typo

{{not a typo}}, does anyone use this template. I kinda feel it would be good to identify false positive typos. Regards, SunCreator (talk) 13:46, 11 September 2011 (UTC)

There are only 141 current uses, so no-one is using it on a large scale. -- John of Reading (talk) 07:49, 15 September 2011 (UTC)
Added some more. This seems like a useful way to not have to repeatably skip none typos with AWB. Regards, SunCreator (talk) 13:01, 17 September 2011 (UTC)
I sometimes use the sic tags. It's not often though but they are useful in the right circumstances. Jason Quinn (talk) 02:20, 10 February 2012 (UTC)

Opera

The article links to Spell-checking With Opera, but this URL is no longer valid - it gives a "We are sorry, this page is not available" error. I did not find any appropriate page on www.opera.com, be it www.opera.com/support or not, I also searched the official Opera forum but to no prevail...

Any ideas? All I could do for now is just delete the whole line which would be a bit... disappointing to say the least, since then there would be no info of Opera and spell checking at all in this page.

(For now I research if it is possible to use Firefox dictionaries with Opera, so maybe I will discover some details about Opera spell checking since for now it is not working for me...)

--22:45, 14 September 2011 (UTC)Dietmar Lettau (talk)

I've now fixed the link to point to Advanced Preferences: Browsing in Opera Help, which has a section on spell-checking. The new instructions are for Opera 11; the old link was for Opera 9, whose instructions were more complicated.
In Opera 11.51 running on Linux, I've found that spell checking just works after installing the relevant dictionary (see the help page for how). Note that I've got the Hunspell spell-checking library installed on my machine; I'm not sure if this makes a difference.
I don't know what format of dictionary Firefox uses, but Opera appears to use a zipped MySpell dictionary in the dictionaries subdirectory of your Opera profile. The dictionary data seems to have been taken from OpenOffice. The ZIP file also includes an additional INI file, which just contains the language name. Hope that helps you in some way. – PartTimeGnome (talk | contribs) 20:42, 15 September 2011 (UTC)

2 percent is an improvement

Just finished a typo check through 21000 reptile related articles and found only a little over 2% had a typo. Although the articles may not be a random sample it seems that an improvement has occured over the 12 months or so. Regards, SunCreator (talk) 18:18, 17 September 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for the info and to everybody helping to make Wikipedia better! Your work counts. Jason Quinn (talk) 18:06, 2 February 2012 (UTC)

randomizer

I was thinking of trying to make something that gives you a random typo to search for and get rid of, what do you guys think? Also, what would be the best way to do it? Glacialfox (talk) 23:25, 15 November 2011 (UTC)

Yes, do you use WP:AWB? Using "source:random pages", take a selection of articles, check them for typos and once you have found a typo you can find others to fix by using the "source:google search" option(if you use this include your typo in double quotes). Regards, SunCreator (talk) 03:14, 16 November 2011 (UTC)
I just did a sample of about 50 random articles and found the typo "posesses" which is corrected to "possesses", then worked through about a dozen of so articles which included that typo, but as I did those articles hit other typos "charachterized","preperation","convienience","weilds","vulnerablities","aparent","consiousness","particulary", "subconcious", "diffrent" mostly from here and here and so I could now search for those typos and it would find other words. So repeat and on and on it goes. Regards, SunCreator (talk) 03:28, 16 November 2011 (UTC)

New common mis-spelling - elction/election

Have been running into this typo quite often of late; posting here in case it's of use to anyone running regular checks for common mis-spellings/typos. - TB (talk) 23:41, 24 November 2011 (UTC)

I just fixed them all. :D Glacialfox (talk) 01:42, 25 November 2011 (UTC)

Still a few showing up in search? I also found some more examples hidden in red links. - TB (talk) 23:23, 25 November 2011 (UTC)
Whoa man, how did you get 132 results? I only got like 9. D; edit: Oh, they seem to be all like talk pages and stuff and the other results just haven't disappeared from the results yet. Red links? Glacialfox (talk) 02:27, 26 November 2011 (UTC)
Ah - I see that the content of links that is hidden by a piped title doesn't show up in Wikimedia or Google searches - i.e. [[you can't search for this|because only this is visible]]. Will see if I can sort this in the next day or two. - TB (talk) 16:42, 26 November 2011 (UTC)
Finally got a chance to run this through Red Link recovery Live. There are 23000 redlinks containing words on the spelling list; of these, 136 match article titles once the recommended correction is made. Visiting this link will display a different one each time you visit until they're all fixed. - TB (talk) 19:03, 4 December 2011 (UTC)

Pledge page

Maybe there should be a note at the top of the pledge page saying to post your pledge at the top (or bottom). It looks like people have been doing both. I guess it doesn't matter too much, but since we all probably have a little bit of perfectionism in us (since we are in a group committed to correcting typos) it would look better to have it more structured. HotshotCleaner (talk) 23:16, 30 November 2011 (UTC)

I put a note of instruction to put the new pledges at the top. Hopefully it will clear up any confusion. I had originally thought pledges should go at the bottom, but when the list gets long, it doesn't make much sense that way. Jason Quinn (talk) 18:05, 2 February 2012 (UTC)

"to try and"

I'm working on "to try and" > "to try to" from the List of common misspellings. An editor has queried this. Your input is welcome at my talk page. -- John of Reading (talk) 19:16, 9 December 2011 (UTC)

Text-mining Wikipedia for misspelled words

Editors may be interested in this external article.

—Wavelength (talk) 18:25, 24 December 2011 (UTC)

I don't believe it for one minute. Would like to see the list of 2,400 random articles and see how many false positives are found. The amount of typo's being found has fallen a lot since I've been using WP:AWB. I now consider only about 2% of articles to have a typo that WP:AWB could find, that is down from about 5% two years ago. So has AWB become worse or is missing a lot? It's not obvious that either of those are true, but would like to see the random sample and implied typos to see if they are false positive(seems likely) or genuine typos. Regards, SunCreator (talk) 00:40, 27 December 2011 (UTC)
I first learned about the study from Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Newsroom/Suggestions#Proportion of misspellings (permanent link here). It has now been reported at Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-12-26/Recent research#Spell-checking the English Wikipedia. The latter page has a section at the bottom for comments.
—Wavelength (talk) 03:13, 28 December 2011 (UTC)
The study had several flaws including a high rate of false positives and checking a random version of an article rather than the current version - so it will have largely missed our efforts. I've written a review of it at User:WereSpielChequers/typo_study. As a reality check User:GoingBatty found a typo that had been up for a surprising 265 days. Which leads me to consider a counter challenge: Who can find the most persistent typo in Wikipedia? Rules would be:
  1. The typo must exist in the current version of an article on the English Wikipedia.
  2. If you made the typo yourself then please fix it yourself and don't enter it in the competition.
  3. Number of days persisting is the number of days between the typo being created and the 1st of Jan 2012 - so no incentive to spot a typo and leave it until it sets a new record
  4. If the typo has not been in mainspace for part of that time due to deletion and restoration or reversion and restoration then only the days that it has been in mainspace count.
  5. Only typos that qualify for correction count. In particular
I Typos in filenames and URLs don't count
II Song titles, lyrics, product names and fictional entities are not typos if we have used a version used by the subject or the creator(s) of the subject
III Typos in quotations don't count unless we have misquoted the source and the typo was a Wikipedia mistake.
Thoughts and rule suggestions would be welcome. I know it is easy to get annoyed by misconceived and inaccurate studies like this, but we have a great record in typo fixing and I think this challenge would make for a great response. ϢereSpielChequers 15:05, 1 January 2012 (UTC)
What counts as a typo? Does it have to be a letter? Can missing full spots, abbreviations (i.e =>i.e. etc=>etc.), extra spaces. WP:ENDASH and other such things that WP:AWB considers a typo still count? Regards, SunCreator (talk) 15:15, 1 January 2012 (UTC)
As this is a response to a survey that said we have incorrectly spelled lots of words I would suggest that for this counter-challenge we restrict it to typos involving an incorrectly spelled word. Other sorts of typos need fixing and might be worth including as a later contest or even a separate category in this contest. We probably also need a category for correctly spelled but incorrect words, not just because those are the typos that I specialise in and could easily find some quite old ones, but also because this study would not pick up such typos ϢereSpielChequers 15:33, 1 January 2012 (UTC)
Starting at the top of Wikipedia:Dusty articles, I've just fixed a typo in Palmerston Forts, Dover. The typo was in the first version of the article, dated 20 June 2006. -- John of Reading (talk) 17:36, 1 January 2012 (UTC)
Congratulations. Hopefully that will win you the contest and be an extreme outlier.... ϢereSpielChequers 18:26, 1 January 2012 (UTC)
From January 2006 Allomone had two e.g. typos that are now fixed. Regards, SunCreator (talk) 23:31, 9 January 2012 (UTC)
I'm changing a lot of people and things from being "Well know" to "well known", including one from Sept 05 But I can't really enter a competition that I proposed, so 2006 is definitely beatable. ϢereSpielChequers 14:18, 14 January 2012 (UTC)
I'm not detecting a tidal wave of enthusiasm for my original suggestion, and as John has demonstrated we do have ancient typos out there if you know where to look. On the other hand the researcher who claims to have found loads of typos has not yet revealed his false positive rate. So I'd like to propose that we go back to the researcher with a slightly different challenge, can he find us a list of articles and typos that have stayed up for over 6 months, with a false positive rate of less than 50%. If we were to make such a challenge would anyone join me in going through such a list? ϢereSpielChequers 10:21, 9 January 2012 (UTC)
I think this is the article SunCreator meant. – PartTimeGnome (talk | contribs) 16:10, 15 January 2012 (UTC)
Oh, that's just a slightly silly write up of the flawed Stacey report. I wouldn't worry about it except that it quotes the Stacey report as if it was correct. ϢereSpielChequers 16:02, 16 January 2012 (UTC)

Up until

The Grammar and Misc list suggests that "up until" should be changed to "until". Is "up until" wrong, or just wordy? My database dump says there are over 14,000 articles containing "up until". -- John of Reading (talk) 09:09, 12 January 2012 (UTC)

Off the top of my head I could not think of a reason to use "up until" instead of just "until". This grammarist.com page suggests the same. I would just read each instance both ways in your head, and if there's no compelling reason to keep "up until", replace it with "until". Jason Quinn (talk) 18:00, 2 February 2012 (UTC)
Thanks for investigating. I'll tackle this one as a background task - working through such a long list would be mind-numbing. -- John of Reading (talk) 18:08, 2 February 2012 (UTC)

Project status and future agenda

I just archived the discussions into Archive 3. There had been no discussion for a while. Many of the topics were stale or obsolete so it made sense for a fresh start.

It might be a good time to evaluate the health of our project. It seems good to me. The Typo Team is a very passive project compared to some others but as the Pledges and Works Contributed pages show, we are still gaining new members and there are active users. Some projects go extinct. Our project keeps on slowly chugging. So congratulations to us all for that!

One small initiative that I think would benefit us is making sure we welcome new members who make a pledge. It's a very small investment in time to do it and it makes the new pledge feel like others care.

If you haven't checked it out yet, please take a look at Wikipedia:Adopt-a-typo. This new project (sub-project?) still needs some work but it's potential is there. In particular, it'd be great to see some new pages in the "nursery" section. So if there's some particular topic of interest to you that has a bunch of related typos, try adding a new page for it.

I'm also tempted to remove the Typo Team "ads" from the main project page. I've never liked the banner-style ads for Wikipedia projects. They, at least for me, violate the aesthetic look-n-feel of Wikipedia. Banner ads had a slightly vogue moment a few years ago for Wikiprojects but whatever amount of momentum they once had seems to have vanished. Regardless, very few users have elected to use these ads, like a dozen total. I don't think they are worth the clutter on the project page. Should they stay or should they go? Jason Quinn (talk) 03:28, 16 March 2012 (UTC)

I'm not a big fan of the banner ads either. However, since we do have some, I think they should be mentioned somewhere on the project, even if just on a subpage. – PartTimeGnome (talk | contribs) 21:25, 16 March 2012 (UTC)
I was thinking exactly the same thing...move them off to a subpage. JimVC3 (talk) 03:52, 17 March 2012 (UTC)

Requested move

The following discussion is an archived discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the move request was: not moved. (non-admin closure) Jenks24 (talk) 08:23, 3 April 2012 (UTC)


Wikipedia:Typo Team → Wikipedia:WikiProject Typo Team – Standard naming convention for all such projects, for years and years now. — SMcCandlish   Talk⇒ ɖ∘¿¤þ   Contrib. 00:16, 25 March 2012 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

New common error: Aministration/Administration

Per title; crops up in more than a handful of articles. - TB (talk) 21:52, 7 June 2012 (UTC)

Now added to WP:AWB see Wikipedia_talk:AutoWikiBrowser/Typos#Aministration_.3D.3E_Administration. Regards, SunCreator (talk) 12:06, 10 June 2012 (UTC)

Moved "ads" to a subpage

As per the above discussion, I have moved the "ads" to a subpage. I still think the best idea is to get rid of them completely instead of crufting up the Team page but so maybe in the future we should do that. It's clear to me that these aren't getting used. Jason Quinn (talk) 02:01, 20 October 2012 (UTC)

Articles with known typos

Here is links to lists of over 50,000 articles that had a known typos according to the AWB typo rules from the database dump in early October. Most of the typos still remain although various people have been working through the first list(Articles with typos 1).

US vs Aus English

I'm a US editor and been editing this page which specifies "Australian English only", and have assumed it is essentially the same as UK English. The "colour" / "theatre" type spellings I can deal with, but there are probably other discrepancies (e.g.: s/z/c). It has been recommended that I try here for assistance. ~Thanks, ~Eric F 74.60.29.141 (talk) 19:12, 10 November 2012 (UTC)

I use Firefox for editing. Firefox allows you to add different dictionaries (right click in a form and look under "Languages"). I have UK, American, and Australian English installed. I can toggle between them easily. The other major browsers probably have a similar way to add/use other dictionaries. Jason Quinn (talk) 00:02, 11 November 2012 (UTC)
Good idea - thanks! I too have Firefox. ~E:74.60.29.141 (talk) 00:54, 11 November 2012 (UTC)

New database report for finding misspellings

Hi. I wrote a new database report called "Linked misspellings (configuration)" recently. People who watch this talk page may find it interesting.

It's still unclear to me what to do in situations where the target is misspelled, but the rendered text is fine. For example, [[Massachusets|Massachusetts]]. It feels a little silly to fix these cases. But it also feels kind of silly to leave the typo in the page source. --MZMcBride (talk) 03:56, 8 December 2012 (UTC)

Cool report! It's definitely the kind of thing worth having. Why is the [[Massachusets|Massachusetts]] case causing doubt? Is it because you believe the existing redirects solve the problem? I'm unsure what you mean. From my perspective, this class of links should be fixed to avoid the redirect. In general I see several cases:
  • target exists ([[X]])
No problems here.
  • target exists only as redirect ([[Xr]])
This is a hard case because it requires context and potential background understanding of the subject. Very bad task for a bot because it's hard to distinguish between alternative spellings and misspellings. Can be hard for humans too.
  • target exists and is name of the article, link text is the same ([[X|X]])
Seems to make sense to condense the [[X|X]] link to just [[X]]. Good task for a bot. There's probably already bots that do this.
  • target exists and is name of article, link text is different ([[X|Xd]])
There's a significant chance that the link text was a deliberate alternative spelling, rather than a misspelling. The link may exist like this merely to avoid the redirect. If "Xd" is "wrong", it requires an understanding of the context, with perhaps some background understanding of the subject. This is not a good task for a bot.
  • target exists but as redirect to chosen article spelling, link text is name of chosen article spelling ([[Xr|X]])
I think this is the case you discuss above. If [[Xr|X]], I see no reason not to use [[X]] here. It's less code. The change is completely invisible to readers on the affected article, and the annoying (and potentially confusing) "redirect from" warning is avoided on the target page. This is win all around. There's no context to worry about so this is a great task for a bot.
Of course, if the targets doesn't exist, that's a different set and the evaluation would be different. For instance, the case you mention should show a red link even though the link text is spelled correctly. This might encourage people to create an article with the misspelled title even though a properly spelled article already exists. For instance, example this Massachusetts. Jason Quinn (talk) 18:52, 8 December 2012 (UTC)
Well, if the link functions (it's blue and the user will be led to page content by clicking it) and the display text is fine, doesn't the cost of editing the page outweigh the benefit to fixing it? In the old or new state, the link still works. In the old or new state, the display text is still the same. People are justifiably often annoyed at edits that are purely cosmetic. In this case, it seems like a mostly cosmetic edit to change [[Massachusets|Massachusetts]] to [[Massachusetts]]. Or for a different example, changing [[Ph. D.|Doctor of Philosophy]] to [[Ph.D.|Doctor of Philosophy]] (or [[Doctor of Philosophy]]).
I've filed bugzilla:42880 to track this issue (or at least a symptom of it). --MZMcBride (talk) 21:33, 8 December 2012 (UTC)
In my own editing, I sometimes consider the article's current size when deciding to make a very minor source change. For smaller pages, I just go ahead and do it. On bigger pages, I usually make trivial changes simultaneously with other bigger changes. Even when only doing trivial changes, I have yet to have somebody complain to me about them but I do tend to use the "minor edit" checkbox fairly consistently, which may be related. Before any large scale changes, as might occur with a bot, this needs to be carefully considered. The "Massachusets" example I think strongly begs to be changed: out-right misspellings have no place in the source because it may be propagated, and the link will lead to a confusing redirect. This is not merely a cosmetic change. For the set of "obvious" misspellings, I see no reason not to change them. Your "Ph.D." example is a good one but does not reverse my opinion. I would still change that link to avoid the redirect. If the user clicks on "Doctor of Philosophy" and it sends them to a page that says they were redirected from "Ph.D,", it's potentially confusing and provides a worse user experience. Your Wikipedia:Database reports/Linked misspellings only lists a few thousand pages. In the grand scope of things, even changing them all does not use up much resources. Jason Quinn (talk) 19:26, 9 December 2012 (UTC)

New "Recent News" box

I've added a new "Recent News" box to the team page. I hope activity there makes the project feel less static. It's to be used for whatever members think is appropriate. I had in mind the awarding of barnstars and medals. It would also be fine to announce big projects individuals have recently completed or wish to ask for help to complete. The aesthetics and technical aspects of the box are not very good, so feel free to improve that if you would like. Cheers, Jason Quinn (talk) 15:36, 18 January 2013 (UTC)

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