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Wikipedia:Typo Team

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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by HoodedMan (talk | contribs) at 13:58, 28 November 2005 (→Work completed). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Welcome to the Wikipedia Typo Department. November 22, 2003 was our first typo correction day.

Typos that need to be corrected

Common typos can be found and should be listed at Wikipedia:List of common misspellings. More complicated cases in need of correction can be listed here. If only one or two articles exist with an incorrect spelling, please feel free to correct them yourself instead of listing the word here.

  • masterful. Masterful means 'domineering, imperious'. It is very frequently (perhaps nearly always) used in newspapers when masterly, meaning 'designed as if by a master, extremely skillful' is intended. I have corrected only one or two wikipedia pages, but watch out!
  • lead instead of led as the past participle or past tense of the verb to lead. The past participle cases shouldn't be too hard to find: has/have/having/was/were/been lead (although some of these are correct, as they refer to the metal or whatever). The past tense cases are generally harder to find, but include he/she/'it lead. --Zundark 19:48, 20 July 2005 (UTC)[reply]
  • Staring/starring and stared/starred. I've noticed a lot of articles using the single-R form when they should be using the double-R. Can probably be detected with searches like "staring in" or "stared with" although a few might be correct ("he stared in disbelief" etc.). Such searches can also reveal cases where starting and started was meant instead, although these are often corrected already as they are more obvious. --Pelago 14:32, 27 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

"Considered to be"

This is the most common mistake I've run into. According to google, there are 201,000 pages that use this phrase on English Wikipedia, and it is never correct. They should all be switched to "consider/considered" (or less often, "consider/considered as"). The term "considered" means "believed to be", so one is effectively saying "believed to be to be". — BRIAN0918 • 2005-10-22 20:19

As mentioned there are 203,000 (as of October 25th) google results. I corrected a number of them at an average rate of 1 every 15 seconds. A simple calculation indicates that correcting 203,000 entries would take 846 hours of work. That's not even considering the rate at which the error is continually made. A simple script for this particular task could correct every mistake in a matter of seconds. I'll look into this further, but I'm still quite new to 'wiki' --p6 15:48, 25 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Are you sure this is the meaning? I don't know really, but my included Oxford American Dictionary on my computer gives the example of "considered to be" under the "consider" entry. -- postglock 09:14, 26 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]
I'm not extremely knowledgeable of all English language grammar rules, but it's quite evident that in any use of "considered to be", "to be" is redundant. As an example, "What is considered to be just in western..." retains full meaning when written as "What is considered just in western...". At any rate, the more I think about it, the more it's moot. There are 45.5 million results on a google search for "considered to be", so it's not something that can be fixed. Much as I may hate to admit it, this battle over 'proper English', isn't worth fighting. --p6 11:47, 26 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]
I'm all for fighting losing battles, but in this case I'm just not sure that redundant = incorrect. I'm also not sure that "considered" is identical to "believed to be" syntactically. For example modifying the (possibly extraneous) "to be" – "he was considered to have been a great man" doesn't work replacing with "believed to be to have been," and obviously the "to have been" in the original sentence is significant. -- postglock 05:32, 27 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]
In my experience, "considered as" is almost always wrong. Tweeq 04:37, 30 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]
While I realize asking someone to prove the opposite is the easy way out, I haven't found one instance where 'considered' ever needed to be 'considered to be', to be syntactically or grammatically correct. p6 08:39, 1 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]
I suspect intuitively that you're probably right, but I'm still not totally convinced that this means the usage is unequivocally incorrect either. - postglock 13:46, 1 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Why are you willing to accept "considered to be" but not "believed to be to be". They are exactly the same. — BRIAN0918 • 2005-11-21 14:25

It seems that "considered to be" is OK. According to the Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary:

consider (OPINION)
verb [T often + object + (to be) + noun or adjective]
to believe someone or something to be, or think of them as:
He is currently considered (to be) the best British athlete.

We don't consider her suitable for the job.

Example sentences in the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary:

Henry Moore is considered to be the father of modern British sculpture.
Liquid crystals are considered to be intermediate between liquid and solid.

and several other examples like it...Ken6en 07:44, 7 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Work in progress

  • I'm writing a spell checker. It's showing many made up words in prototyping. See my user page on Meta. -- Archivist 00:17, Nov 30, 2003 (UTC)
    • Wikitravel has a spellchecker running somehow. Is this of any help? -- Kokiri 08:30, 9 Jan 2004 (UTC)
      • It's the same one that was turned off in Wikipedia because it slowed down the database. -phma 13:59, 18 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Checking spelling

The tools below can be used if you are unsure of how a word is spelled and do not have an actual dictionary handy.

Free internet dictionaries

Free online spell checkers

Lists of common misspellings

Miscellaneous

  • The latest version of Konqueror highlights misspelled words in text boxes.
  • Users of Mac OS X can spell-check an input box in Safari from the "Spelling" submenu in the context menu of the box (activated via Control-click or right-click). Spell-check-as-you-type can also be enabled there or alternatively in the application "Edit" menu.
  • Users of Mozilla Firefox can download the Spellbound extension to check spelling. See User:Omegatron#Spell checker.
    • I have been using the "SpellBound" extension for my Firefox web browser to do my Wikipedia spell-checking and recommend it. It works much like any spell-checker in a word-processor, and does spell-checking inside any form. It comes with American English already installed, and you can add additional language-country variations such as British English. It is relatively slow on my 400 MHz computer, but that is only a problem on large articles. [[User:GK|gK ¿?]] 08:23, 6 Dec 2004 (UTC)
  • ieSpell is a good spell-checker for Internet Explorer. Right-click in the edit box to check spelling. Miss Pippa 23:50, 8 Mar 2005 (UTC)
  • The newest Google Toolbar includes a multilanguage spell-check feature for forms.

Using online dictionaries

If a word does not exist, you often get this kind of result:

Did you mean exec rise?

Make sure to click the underlined word, then check if that word does exist, because the underlined word or words in the message do not always exist. But often when you get this message, it gives the correct spelling or it gives the word of which what you're trying to look up is derived of.

When you look up an entry, punctuation and capitalization do not make any difference. For example, looking up "etc", "etc.", "ETC", "et.c.", or "e-t-c" all yield the same results. Unfortunately, some entries that come up when using improper punctuation or capitalization suggest that the punctuation is right. When looking up "et.c.", for example, the top entry may punctuate it correctly with one full stop, but another entry may punctuate it incorrectly as "et.c." (i.e., the same punctuation you typed in the search box). With the American Heritage Dictionary, an entry is always properly punctuated and capitalized, but often some other entries are punctuated and capitalized just as you typed them.

Work completed

Pledges

Members of the Typo Team

See also

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