Wikipedia talk:Lists of common misspellings

What is "fuck" a misspelling of? -- Sam

Of nothing. I had initially added it to the list in order to spot potential vandalism. -User:Olivier

Thanks to Magnus, Axelboldt & everybody who set this up!
We need to find a way to eliminate false positives on proper nouns, like the 1921 Battle of Anual in Morocco. The capitalized word Anual in the link is correctly spelled. --Ed Poor

Capitalization doesn't tell you much; beginnings of sentences and titles may or may not be misspellings. This is why we have human beings to look at things case-by-case. --Brion 22:30 Oct 22, 2002 (UTC)

I'm sure what you mean by "find a way", Ed. The way is just to leave them alone. This maintenance page is nothing but a handly way to find things--what you do when you find them requires human judgment. I'd personally appreciate it if you'd remove the contractions from the list--there's nothing at all wrong with contractions even in formal encyclopedic text. --LDC

Contractions

coudln (couldn't)
hasn (has not)
isn (is not, sin)
wasn (was not)
weren (were not)
wouldn (would not)

I am the one who had added most of the contractions that you have listed here. My sense is that they give a very colloquial tone to the articles, which somewhat could hurt the credibility of those articles (at least that is the way I perceive them when I read them). Do not we want the 'pedia to be considered as a "reference"? In addition to this, I have done quite a few edits of articles containing such contractions, and my sense is that they often were written in a very colloquial tone (same remark), plus they often contained several misspellings. -User:Olivier

Ed, I really disagree with your removing of the contractions from the list without even trying to generate a discussion around that. Has it been agreed by Wikipedians that contractions are OK? I believe that they are not, and will keep removing them from the articles were I find them (unless they are part of a quoted text). I would like to have them back in the list unless someone can give me good arguments for the contrary. -User:Olivier

I tried adding the following:

1920's (1920s)
1930's (1930s)
1940's (1940s)
1950's (1950s)
1960's (1960s)
1970's (1970s)
1980's (1980s)
1990's (1990s)

But the SQL query for the maintenance page choked on it. I don't suppose there's some way to tweak it so that it will work with apostrophes? Bryan

Not sure, but you can use the regular page search on them. --Brion 22:30 Oct 22, 2002 (UTC)

I've just added 'archeology' -> 'archaeology' etc to the list - which I did with confidence when I saw that there was already one variant there. Having done this, I see that there are an enormous number of 'archeology' spellings araound - Is this then an acceptable US spelling? In which case they'll need removing from the list again. -- SGBailey 09:34 Dec 30, 2002 (UTC)

All dictionaries I've looked at (both American and British) give both spellings, but all seem to prefer archaeology. --Zundark 17:12 Dec 30, 2002 (UTC)

Where a "misspelling" is intentional, is there any markup available in wiki to tell SQL to not add that one to the list? (Have to consider what happens if he word occurs twice, once intentionally misspelt and once in error). -- SGBailey 08:23 Jan 1, 2003 (UTC)

I don't think so. If we ever add one, I would vote for [sic] because of its standardized meaning. --Ellmist Wednesday January 1st, 2003

Why is wanna a misspelling? Please reply on my discussion page

I know there is the risk of false positives, but some words are more prone to be false positives than others. Why not create a "SpellBot" that will worm its way over all the articles in wikipedia and automatically correct for spelling mistakes? It's an idea at least. -- Ram-Man

Please, no! I respect your intention, but I would hate to see the 'pedia mangled by a well-meaning but clumsy spill chucker. What I would like, though, is a bot that looks for what it thinks are spelling mistakes in articles, then for each article pops up a page resembling the "differences from last version" page that exists now. It would show its proposed corrections in red in the right-hand column, so you could change any that it got wrong and then click "Save Page". A user could invoke this bot by clicking on a "Show me a random page that the bot thinks contains spelling mistakes" link on a maintenance page. This would require a lot of human intervention, but would be the only safe way to do it. -- Heron

Hi, I'd like to hear more about the Spell-bot. You've noted, I hope, the caveats on the "list of misspellings" page. :-) Koyaanis Qatsi

I basically copied the list of mispellings into a file that the bot can use. I'll write it up so that when it finds an article with a potential mispelling it will prompt me with a subset of the string and ask if I should make the change. It will require intervention, but it will prevent a lot of problems. Since I don't have that many pressing issues with the rambot's geographical articles, I can do spelling if people would like that. I'll give it a test run in a few days to see what happens. -- Ram-Man

Sounds fine. I was concerned mostly about cases where there are several possible "correct" answers, as well as cases like the Tao Teh Ching, which will prompt you to rename the book. ;-) Koyaanis Qatsi

I don't know about a spelling bot. How can it possibly work? What about intentional misspellings? How would it differentiate those? RickK 23:56, 22 Nov 2003 (UTC)

Does anyone have a shorter list of the really most common misspellings, say a top 100? Dori 03:57, Nov 23, 2003 (UTC)

I've made such a list of most common misspellings, although it is specific to Wikipedia and does not reflect recent changes. Wmahan 00:33, 2004 Apr 5 (UTC)

As far as I'm concerned, "publically" is a misspelling (albeit a very common one) but it was recently removed from the list of common misspellings. Comments? Stewart Adcock 21:08, 9 Feb 2004 (UTC)

There was a bit of a discussion about it on User:Archivist's talk page in the aftermath of WikiTypo Day. Hideous as it appears to some of us, apparently it is recorded in some dictionaries. Usage guides tend to frown on it, however. –Hajor 21:19, 9 Feb 2004 (UTC)

A quick Google on the popularity returned 216,000 hits for 'publically' vs. 5,160,000 hits for 'publicly'; thus, publicly is used 96% of the time online vs 4% for the variant spelling. A quick perusal of the top results for each seem to indicate that it's not a UK vs. US spelling issue; results for both are all over the place.

I believe it's Merriam-Webster that lists it; a variety of online dictionaries have it, but they all look like they're taking it from M-W. Do we have a policy to remove less common alternate spellings from Wikipedia?

While it's the spelling I've always used, I don't care enough to 'un-correct' it if people change it; however, the principle of correcting spellings listed as valid does concern me a little.

I could find only one reference online to the issue; the Columbia Guide to Standard American English says:

publicly, publically (advs.)

Publicly is the usual spelling; publically does occur, but rarely in Edited English.

By 'Edited English' they mean what, in their opinion, is appropriate for formal and semi-formal written use. No other source accessible online offers a usage opinion.

If it's consensus that we should correct rare spellings considered deprecated by some style guides, then go ahead; I am however unsure we have such a consensus, and would like to hear some opinions on the matter. —Morven 23:44, 9 Feb 2004 (UTC)

I had been making "publically=>publicly" changes all over the place but I stopped when Morven, correctly, pointed out that some dictionaries consider "publically" to be valid. I am now very much undecided on whether the remaining examples should be "corrected". Stewart Adcock 00:29, 10 Feb 2004 (UTC)

encypher may be British English - needs checking. Secretlondon 12:35, 26 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Nope. It's just wrong, or at least a very unusual variant spelling. My theory is that people are confusing it with encrypt. It's a bit like the word rhyme, which started off as rime but then picked up a y by association with rhythm. -- Heron 13:05, 26 Mar 2004 (UTC)

This issue has returned in my list of common misspellings (see User talk:Wmahan/Articles with common misspellings). I notice that both dictionary.com and m-w.com have encipher but not encypher, but of course dictionaries aren't necessarily the final word. Does anyone have any evidence or arguments either way? I'm leaning towards removing encypher from my list of misspellings. Thanks. Wmahan . 21:35, 2004 May 3 (UTC)

Update: since there seems to be agreement on the issue, I've commented out encypher from the list. Wmahan . 17:40, 2004 May 4 (UTC)

Hi, I've made a list of articles with common misspellings as of the last ~~time Google updated its index~~ database dump. Perhaps checking these articles by hand isn't as easy as using an automated spelling bot, but I think this could be useful finding articles that need attention. If you agree, feel free to help. Any other suggestions are welcome. Wmahan 00:16, 2004 Apr 5 (UTC)

Update: I updated the list so that articles are sorted by the misspelled word; perhaps the new format will be more compatible with the work of people who go through this list when correcting articles. Wmahan . 01:17, 2004 Apr 20 (UTC)

Listing androgenous as an incorrect spelling of androgynous is risky. Both are valid words, and though closely related, have different meanings.

Thanks for pointing out the distinction; I have commented out androgenous. Wmahan . 18:36, 2004 May 6 (UTC)

Supercede/supersede

M-W lists supercede as a valid variant of supersede. Is there a particular reason it's listed as a misspelling (I notice dictionary.com doesn't have it), or is it an error? —Lady Lysiŋe Ikiŋsile | Talk 20:53, 2004 Jul 21 (UTC)

Bill Bryson's Dictionary of Troublesome Words says that only supersede is appropriate. kmccoy (talk) 20:59, 21 Jul 2004 (UTC)