Editing on 2020-05-28: Live Spellcheck!

I’m pretty good at thinking up ways a person might misspell words in Wikipedia articles, but can I come up with enough of them to reach 20,000 edits by the end of this year? Maybe not on my own, but fortunately I have help.

There’s a whole team of editors dedicated to fixing typos on Wikipedia! They maintain lists of common misspellings and commonly misused words, and possible typos in specific articles already identified. They also maintain a list of tools for correcting spelling, some of which also identify other common errors such as unbalanced brackets. I’ve tried out many of these tools, and one of my favorites is Lupin’s Live Spellcheck.

This tool runs in a web page, and scans pages as they are saved for possible common errors, such as this one:

The typo “incuding” for “including” wasn’t introduced by that new edit, which was doing constructive copy-editing and grammar cleanup in the article, but it was in the article when that version was saved.

The tool has a very nice interface to do the correction quickly: clicking that bold incuding opens a new browser tab editing that article, with that change made, and an edit summary:

Correcting spelling: incuding->including

After clicking you can just confirm that the edit is appropriate, and then publish it to the encyclopedia. This tool is often where I find typos to search for; after correcting this typo, I was able to find and correct around 26 more instances of variants of “incude” which should have been “include”.

While a global search and replace for such obvious typos would be more efficient, in this case it would have introduced errors: the word “incudes” is a real word (pronounced “in-kyoo-deez”, the plural for “incus”, a tiny bone in the middle ear also called the “anvil”), and this term did appear correctly used in multiple Wikipedia articles.

Current Stats

• Edit count: 16514
• Days remaining: 217
• Edits/day needed: 16.1
• Typos chased:
  • incude -> include (and variations)