User talk:Beland

Feel free to leave a note. -- Beland (talk) 21:34, 24 March 2018 (UTC)Reply

Had a look at the moss project and was wondering how difficult it would be to run it on wiktionary itself? (A bit strange since it's used as a spellchecker for the project.) –Jberkel 09:40, 3 June 2022 (UTC)Reply

@Jberkel: Turns out it only took a bit of downloading and few lines of code to do that. An initial run showed promising results, though Wikipedia and Wiktionary have slightly different style guides and content patterns, so there may need to be some tweaking to optimize typo reports. I just added some code to account for the fact that Wiktionary allows curly quote marks - Wikipedia editors wanted to prioritize spell-checking non-quoted material, especially since sometimes typos or obsolete spellings are retained on purpose. Though if you think the quotations on Wiktionary are ready to be spell-checked, I can do that instead, and we can use {{sic}} to tag incorrect-on-purpose quotations. (Quotes over 1000 characters will be spell-checked regardless.) I also expect there will also be some overlap with the built-in and your own very helpful wanted-page lists, though I do have some heuristics to try to distinguish actual misspellings from rare or non-English words that simply haven't yet been defined. I've started Wiktionary:Spell check as a collaboration point. Thanks for this excellent suggestion! -- Beland (talk) 20:42, 4 June 2022 (UTC)Reply

Wow, that's great, thanks! One immediate thing: it'd be helpful to have these (alternatively) sorted by language, if possible. – Jberkel 07:23, 7 June 2022 (UTC)Reply

@Jberkel: Hmm, interesting suggestion. I think I see how it can be done and made useful for situations where the "typo" is actually just an undefined word and the definitions that use it all belong to the same language. I will try to whip something up when I have some time. -- Beland (talk) 02:44, 26 July 2022 (UTC)Reply

This is still a todo item. -- Beland (talk) 20:35, 4 March 2025 (UTC)Reply

Thanks for updating/regenerating the list; it's quite useful. :) One small thing I notice: it doesn't seem to handle long s, e.g. it parses "aduerſaries" (in ridicle) as "aduer" (ideally it would recognize ſ as s, the way pages with long s automatically redirect after a few seconds). Another idea: a lot of the results are obsolete spellings found in quotations in entries; it'd be useful to separate out potential misspellings / missing entries that are found "in wikivoice", in definitions i.e. in lines starting with # (not #*, #:, etc). - -sche (discuss) 22:03, 23 December 2022 (UTC)Reply

@-sche: Hmm, interesting points. Would forms with long s and obsolete spellings normally get their own entries, or are they not eligible? -- Beland (talk) 22:06, 23 December 2022 (UTC)Reply

If they meet the other criteria for inclusion — mainly, having been used 3 times, not just once — most obsolete spellings (using different letters, e.g. moone as an obsolete spelling of moon, or euery as an obsolete spelling of every) have entries. Certain special codepoints for character variations are ignored, so the entry for ſit is sit (although quotations are not forbidden from being entered using ſit), the entries for fin, stun are fin, stun, etc (so, the script should treat ridicle's aduerſaries quote as containing aduersaries, rather than just cutting the string off at aduer like it currently does).
My rationale for splitting "obsolete spellings in quotes" (especially obsolete spellings in quotes that aren't even English, e.g. the 1370s Galician quote(s) using caualo) from "potential typos in wikivoice / definitions" is that the first set is often not an error and/but entering them is a relatively low priority (we probably already have entries for the non-obsolete spellings, like moon), whereas the second set is higher priority, an undefined word in a definition is either a typo we should fix or a valid word we should probably define if we're using it in definitions. - -sche (discuss) 22:22, 24 December 2022 (UTC)Reply

@-sche: Gotcha, that makes sense. Work is about to get fairly busy, but I'll put this on my to-do list. -- Beland (talk) 16:32, 28 December 2022 (UTC)Reply

Quotes should now be ignored, and for long "s" I just made redirects as noted on the project talk page. -- Beland (talk) 20:04, 4 March 2025 (UTC)Reply

Hi, thanks for the spell checking dumps. It might be nice to show in parentheses a number if there are multiple typos on the same page. Hftf (talk) 01:39, 4 March 2025 (UTC)Reply

Hmm, yeah, it could save some time if an editor could resolve all the typos on a page at the same time. Looking into this, it's a bit complicated because the system flags some things as typos that would show up in typo counts which are not reported because they are currently low-priority or later get filtered as unlikely to actually be a typo. This would result in incorrect counts unless I make some substantial code changes. It also leaves it up to the editor to go track down what the other typos are.

I'm wondering if a reasonable compromise would be to sort the lists by page title rather than by typo. This would in most cases put all the typos for the same page right next to each other in the list. It would mean that the lists are no longer sorted by frequency of the typo, but it's not hard to spot the high-frequency ones in the lists if people want to work through them that way. This sort order also sorts pages by writing system, which would help people interested in working on specific languages (as Jberkel suggested above). I will do a run with that sorting and post it so we can see how we feel about it. -- Beland (talk) 20:44, 4 March 2025 (UTC)Reply

I would personally prefer the status quo sorting, though wouldn't oppose a secondary index sorted by page/script/lang or whatever, or a sortable table so that the user can decide. Even with the "a bit complicated"/"later get filtered" part, anything that indicates "there may be more than one detected typo on this page" can inform the user to look carefully and/or just use Ctrl-F on the list page to check others. At the very least, if there are two typos of the same detected word, a "(×2)" after it would be nice if that's easy to print. Thanks! Hftf (talk) 21:51, 4 March 2025 (UTC)Reply

Below is an example of what sortable tables will look like in the next update. If the number on the left is greater than the number of pages listed, that means at least one of them has multiple instances of the same (possible) typo, though I admit that is rather subtle. The system also won't detect all instances of a word, e.g. if some are inside templates or quotations, so I'm reluctant to give a number if it might be a misleading undercount. -- Beland (talk) 08:57, 5 March 2025 (UTC)Reply

Hello, thanks for the new layout. On the next run, would it be possible to include typo checking within translation table headers? See e.g. . Thanks. Hftf (talk) 08:29, 3 May 2025 (UTC)Reply