User:Bigger digger
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Hi and welcome to my user page. Not much of any use for you here, mainly links to things I need whilst editing. Cheers! Bigger digger (talk · contribs)
Useful links
- Help:Reverting & WP:WARN
- Wikipedia:Citing sources, Wikipedia:Citation templates & Template:Rp
- Wikipedia:Template messages/Sources of articles & Category:Citation and verifiability maintenance templates & Template:Citation_needed
- Help:Editing
- Template:Talkback
- WP:WT Welcome Templates
- WP:COORD, WP:Obtaining geographic coordinates and gpsies.com
- Wikipedia:CatScan
Fixing spelling mistakes
At Wikipedia:Lists of common misspellings you can do a search for a particular common spelling error. Say nothern (northern). A list will be generated of all articles in which "nothern" appears. Note that lists sometimes take some time to propagate depending on the prevalence of the error. However, Google is actually a much better and faster search engine than Wikipedia's internal one, especially for words that either may be included in others (e.g. layed (laid) if searched on Wikipedia will find 50,000 articles with the word played in them, whereas Google will not make this error of inclusion) and for words that are spelled differently when pluralized (e.g., knive (knife). When doing a google search use this search parameter, placing the word sought before it: -inurl:wiki-User -intitle:Talk -inurl:wiki-Wikipedia -inurl:wiki-WP -redirected-from site:en.wikipedia.org. So the list of common mispellings is a great place to find what errors to search, but use Google for the search.
If you're going to do this, you should spend some time vetting the error to avoid changing it where it is proper. Is there a famous person whose last name is correctly spelled nothern in multiple articles? Is it a technical term in some arcane discipline? Is it correctly misspelled as the name of some work? Also note that the list of common spelling error article contains the misspelling and will often be found during the search. Also, sometimes an article specifically about the word at issue (under the correct spelling) may refer to the fact that that word is "sometimes misspelled ____". If you're actually going to do this, I once wrote an instruction page on a fast method of making the changes. If you want that, just drop me a message. --Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 17:38, 31 January 2009 (UTC)