Wikipedia talk:Typo Team

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By the way, I have a page with the queries I have run on old dumps if anyone is interested: User:Dori/Queries. Cross out or delete any that you look at and fix or find out that are not a problem anymore. Dori 04:02, Nov 23, 2003 (UTC)

How would I go about joining the typo department? Can anyone just sign up for it? What kind of work does it entail? Muriel noticed I do a lot of cleaning up already a while ago and suggested I get involved. Sarge Baldy 09:37, Dec 8, 2003 (UTC)

It's perfectly informal. The typo page merely serves to coordinate activities. Yes, you can just sign up. --Naddy 22:04, 8 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Umm, you're going to have to do this all over again in a while to catch new typos, yes? Not that it's not worth doing it the first time, of course, but I was just stuck by the listing of typos that had been checked. Noel 17:45, 12 Mar 2004 (UTC)

I just search this page before doing a check, if it's more than a week or two since it's been done I'll check again, because that gives google time to re-cache pages so you're not chasing you're own tail. Richard cocks 18:13, Mar 12, 2004 (UTC)


Hi, I just used google to search for "feautres" I've corrected all the articles that I found is there a place I can add this word so that others can check upon it as well?--Drawde83 21:54, 3 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Wikipedia:Redrwan awards

Dear Members of the Typo Team, tired of correcting typos and not having fun with it? Add the funniest typos to the Redrwan awards. (Kingturtle created this to award me for my silliest typo ever and gave me the penitence of three random page copyedits.) Cheers all, Muriel 09:59, 15 Mar 2004 (UTC)

This is a very cool idea :) If I bump into something truly incredible I'll have to be sure to make a nomination. Sarge Baldy 03:18, Mar 18, 2004 (UTC)

Wikitravel Misspellings

The spell checker mentioned seems Ameri-biased. Perfectly good British spellings are considered misspellings (e.g. centre, colour). Not very globally friendly. Brooklyn Nellie (Nricardo) 03:46, Mar 31, 2004 (UTC)

Wikitravel prefers American spellings because "the founders of Wikitravel are Americans" and they want to be consistent. Wikipedia was initiated by an American and our policy seems much more fine-tuned. Maybe Wikitravel's policy will someday change. Could Wikitravel's spellchecker be perhaps modified to suit our needs? Chris Roy 04:05, 31 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Googling for typos

Howdy from a wikinewbie. I was wondering if you guys made use of google when hunting for misspellings? Granted, google is normally a week or so out of date, but queries on words from Wikipedia:List_of_common_misspellings such as:

pick out nasties with a reasonably small amount of noise. TB 18:24, 28 Apr 2004 (UTC)

I use google, but didn't think to use the intitle: bit, thank you very much for that, it'll make finding them a lot quicker. Richard cocks

Hey, the "intitle:" part removes the problem with talk pages in the results that has been annoying us! Thanks, TB. Chris Roy 05:03, 2 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]

Hi guys. I've recently been fiddling about with an offline copy of the database and was looking at ways of testing whether links to articles which do not exist can be 'converted' into links to articles that do exist by testing for common spelling errors. For example, if I detect an article that has a link to an article that doesn't exist - say Jeff Freisen. I might try removing the repeated f and checking if Jef Freisen exists or transposing the 'e' and the 'i' and checking if Jeff Friesen exists (the right thing to do in this case).

There's a preliminary sample of the sort of things the script picks out at User:Topbanana/Reports/This page contains a link that might be misspelled. Being more proficient with databases than spelling, I was hoping to draw upon the talents of the typo team to suggest common perturbations of words that it would be useful to test for. All feedback very welcome indeed. - TB 11:01, Jun 3, 2004 (UTC)

I don't know if it is technically a typo, but some people just forget to press the spacebar after a comma, semicolon or full stop, or they don't know that they should. These are just common examples, a space might be required yet missing between any letter and punctuation mark. Does anybody know of any way to check for such an error? The only search engines I know can only seem to be able to search for full words, and that doesn't help me in any way. Is there any search engine that allows you to search for groups of characters? If someone somewhere typed something like "old,however", you would have to guess what mistake he made to find it. But if you could just search for ",h", you could find this mistake and others that contain the character group. VoX, 23:32, 4 Jun 2004 (UTC)

This sort of search is easy enough to do directly agains a copy of the Wikipedia database. Have a look at the list available here. If this is a useful janitorial tool, I'll generate a fuller, more intelligent report about thissort of thing. - TB 01:16, Jun 5, 2004 (UTC)

spellchecking Special:Randompage

I've just put together a simple script which I've been running by hand from my Linux machine (should work on any unix-like system) to pull Special:Randompage and spell check it. Lots of false positives for words which are valid but not in my dictionary, but I have found and fixed more than a few legit errors already. 

#!/bin/sh

lynx -nolist -dump http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Randompage > /tmp/wiki.$$
TITLE=`head -4 /tmp/wiki.$$ | tail -1`
URL="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/`echo $TITLE | sed 's/ /_/g'`"
echo "Article: $TITLE"
echo "URL: $URL"
echo "Checking spelling: "
aspell --add-extra-dicts british -l < /tmp/wiki.$$ 2>/dev/null | grep -v Wiki
rm /tmp/wiki.$$

PxT 19:44, 15 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Commonly mis-spelled words report

Guys - I've finally gotten around to writing a report that checks for mis-spelled words. There's a sample at User:Topbanana/Reports/This article may contain a mis-spelled word (geenrated from the 20th June database dump). If any of you have a moment or two to try it out and give feedback I'd be most grateful. Cheers. - TB 17:03, Jun 22, 2004 (UTC)

Arrrgh

Mediawiki's built-in spellchecker [1]was working for a couple of hours but isn't anymore. I'm sad now. -- Cyrius|✎ 05:44, 24 Jun 2004 (UTC)

OUP report

Oxford University Press has published a report of the most common misspellings, which (in these days of spellcheckers) seem mostly to be cases where two similarly spelt words are interchanged. The worst offender is "diffuse" (as in "gases diffuse") and "defuse" (as in "defuse the situation"). Ironically, all the diffuses/defuses in Wikipedia seem to be correct, but there are a few more of their findings listed on guardian.co.uk.

Thanks for this, this will be invaluable in detecting common typos.--Knucmo2 18:38, 12 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Capitalization

"Prefecture" should be capitalized when it's part of a proper noun. (Also noted at Wikipedia:Manual of Style (Japan-related articles).) I ran a scan on the 26 Nov 2004 database dump, and detected a number of errors. Matches are shown with an excerpt from the article in question. -- Beland 05:10, 5 Dec 2004 (UTC)

(list removed)

So after I ran my scan, I discovered I was working off an incomplete database. I also noticed that there were some other words that cause similar problems. So I ran a more sophisticated scan on "city", "county", "prefecture", "province", "subprefecture", "state", and "district". It had to be a little more intelligent because there are tens of thousands of potential problems, and a high false positive rate would waste a lot of time. In any case, I've posted a dump to Wikipedia:Typo/capitalization for people to work on. If you notice any other common mistakes that might benefit from an automated scan, it might be a good idea to post your observation to Wikipedia:Bot requests. -- Beland 05:43, 10 Dec 2004 (UTC)

(The capitalization list is now defunct. -- Beland 04:12, 9 August 2005 (UTC))[reply]

comming -> coming?

What queries should I run?

I have the 2005-02-09 database dump (direct download at [2]) and I wouldn't mind running some queries/searches. What do I do? r3m0t 17:33, 15 Feb 2005 (UTC)

ie eg

I see a good number of articles which have the (to me) extremely grating use of "ie" or "eg" where the proper spelling in my idiolect would be "i.e." or "e.g." and would always be followed by a comma. Is this just an error or is there a style which favors leaving out the periods from Latin abbreviations? 18.26.0.18 07:05, 18 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Agreed - I fix these as I come across them. Dave.Dunford 11:57, 29 Apr 2005 (UTC)

More irritating to me is people who use ie. when they mean eg. and vice versa. (Personally, I write them with just one dot but I recognise most would disagree.) -- RHaworth 07:13, 2005 Feb 18 (UTC)

Signing up?

How does one go about signing up if they are interested in joining this department? (Typos are practically all I edit.)

Just add your name to the list and keep up correcting the tyops typos. - Marcika 23:02, 23 Apr 2005 (UTC)

alternate DNS root?

should alternate be changed in the above case? I believe not as it is part of the technological term, started incorrectly. Ytgy111 08:03, 9 Jun 2005 (UTC)

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