Talk:Typographical error

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The article says "A typographical ommitting the word "not" in the sentence "thou shalt not commit adultry." This printing of the Bible has become known as the Wicked Bible."

Shouldn't "error" be placed between "typographical" and "omitting?" Also, "omitting" is spelled incorrectly. 75.72.7.108 (talk) 22:50, 10 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Hello, I'm the contributor that made this subheading. "Correcting" it to The best thing ever! somewhat nullifies the parody that it was representing. If you're going to correct it to a more "useful" subheading, it should probably be "Ridicule by excessive, sardonic mispelling and exclamation mark replacement" or some such, as the "correct" text is of even less informational value. As it's a subheading, I really do think it is quite OK to leave it as the parodied text. I am reverting for now. Let's discuss it here. --mordemur 14:31, 25 Jan 2005 (UTC)

I was a bit too enthustiastic about fixing typos. The present headline is great. Lapinmies 20:32, 25 Jan 2005 (UTC)

I don't want to be a wowser, but doesn't this section border on trivial? Rintrah 16:15, 8 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I think that the “taht si teh bset thign evar!!!!1111oneoneone” paragraph was the best thing (evar?) on Wikipedia. I don't think it should have been wiped off this way. --Manfroze 14:02, 1 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I don't think that Yahoo page capture is representative of a typo. If it was the result of an accidental cut'n'paste then maybe so, but it's more likely to be the result of a double entry in a backend database. mordemur 03:33, 16 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Does anyone else refer to cut'n'paste errors as paste-o's? Much different than a typo. Myth010101 04:35, 15 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I've seen this poem widely propagated in email. Is it encyclopedic enough to mention in this article?

• "Candidate for a Pullet Surprise" (Often called "An Owed to the Spelling Checker") by Jerrold H. Zar
• An Ode to Spelling Checkers

Hello, I am not a native speaker and I don't get the nursery rhyme. Could anybody explain it to me? Maybe explaining it in the article might make sense too. Thanks --80.139.74.66 18:26, 19 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I've included a link in the article. OK? Gnusmas 18:34, 19 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, thanks. --80.139.105.58 07:32, 20 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I've also just added a link. IMHO BargainChecker is a poor choice of site to link to as it basically just fills the Google search results with scraped listings from eBay. I've added a link to Missing-Auctions.com (no relation to me) as it offers weekly emails of brand names that are commonly misspelled as well a video tutorial and an eBook. IMHO it's a much better choice as it offers value to the user. Hope that's ok? —Preceding unsigned comment added by JaneCole (talk • contribs) 08:08, 15 October 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I disagree that this should be included in the definition of a typo. Typos, as I see them, are purely mechanical mistakes; whether they originate from a slip of the fingers, or a dodgy keyboard. Someone who types "there" instead of "their" is not making a typo: they're simply a person who either does not know how to spell, or if they do know, the difference is not ingrained in their mind enough for them not to make the mistake. This is different from a tpyo. EuroSong ^talk 11:05, 14 August 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I agree with you and went ahead and changed that paragraph. I think the most important thing about a typo is that it's a type of mistake specific to using a keyboard, like writing 'thw' for 'the' just because 'w' is next to 'e'. No one would make this kind of error if writing with pen and paper. Tocharianne 23:51, 29 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

We could change the article's title to Typographical eror for a subtle self-reference. We would show Britannica that wikipedia is wittier! Rintrah 16:37, 18 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Bad idea. I don't think Wikipedia condones those kinds of intentional self-references. ZtObOr 02:30, 17 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I highly doubt we need citation for that. But hey, maybe that's not treu.

Edit: true* —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.72.82.183 (talk) 03:43, 22 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Jesus, did typographical errors even exist before the advent of the internet? Typonese is barely even a word. Davilla (talk) 05:37, 15 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Of course they did, and if you see something questionable which is unsourced then

fix it. Bill ^{(talk|contribs)} 15:09, 15 September 2008 (UTC)[reply

]

Although I'm not a particularly religious man, including "Bible Errata" in the "Other Articles" section seems a bit dubious to me...thoughts? Contributions/206.108.5.92 (talk) 19:30, 15 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Michael (talk) 18:37, 9 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Suppose I come across a problem in an article that is clearly wrong and needs to be fixed

• but I don't know how to fix it
• must leave for later and/or for some other editor
• wish to mark the problem with some non-word string, like "sic", but different,
• so that I can find it again,
• but what string "_____" ??
• Then, later on, I would be able to search for "_____" and return to the problem(s).
• I could leave a message in the Talk page, but searches for "_____" do not seem to search through the search pages, which is unhelpful.
• At the moment, a search for "sic" returns 22,548 which is far too many to search through.
• It would be best if all wiki editors used the same string "_____"
• For example, there is an article Randy Moss with a faulty infobox, which was marked "Infobox Confused", but when returning to the problem, a search for "Infobox confused" found so many matches (5172) that is was not possible to located the problem article again, hence the need for a non-word search string "_____".
• Fortunately, the string "Infobox Confused" could be found in my "Contributions log", but other editors do not seem to be able to search other editor's logs.
• So what is a good search string for "_____".
• It should be a non-word to minimize the number of false matches.

• Tabletop (talk) 02:22, 18 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

An editor has asked for a discussion to address the redirect

An editor has asked for a discussion to address the redirect Opty. Please participate in the redirect discussion if you wish to do so. TheAwesomeHwyh 02:00, 30 March 2020 (UTC)[reply]

An editor has asked for a discussion to address the redirect

I believe the idea here was to convey the difference between deliberate, intentionally modified spellings as opposed to erroneous outputs. However, the usage of "p0rn" doesn't really qualify as obfuscation in my opinion, for the following reasons:

• The act of obfuscation implies the intent of reducing or restricting the communicative value of a message. This is true for both its disambiguated form in natural language, as well as its software-centric vernacular usage; however, in the case of the latter, there is an additional target attribution defined: human recipients.
• The usage of "p0rn" likely qualifies under systems of modified spellings in its use of a character replacement, but in this particular example the replacement character is selected purely for its glyph reflection characteristic and does not effectively diminish the actual communicative value of the word.
• The citation being referenced touches upon the intentional use of misspelling as a means of circumventing automated chat filters. While I'm not familiar with whether there is a more suitable vernacular in that particular use case (colloquially or nomenclaturally), the intent there is solely to mitigate programmatic or syntactic parsability; in other words, there is no implicit impact to the message's readability toward human recipients (if anything, the intent would arguably be to preserve the latter while achieving the former).
• The cited source does not actually mention the word "obfuscation" or its other forms.

Keeping in mind that the intended objective of edits being discussed here should be to contribute to the improvement of the respective article's content, I'm not sure whether it'd be more appropriate to: 1) choose a different example word, 2) choose a different derivative of the same example word (such as "pr0n"), or 3) change its classification to something else that it does appropriately qualify for, etc. Being that I'm a newcomer to the contributor mantle, I'd like to abstain from boldness and instead defer to the more experienced community members present.

Some time ago I searched for the first reference to an often cited printing error anecdote about Matthew 7:3. It has to do with a missing initial "o" in the Latin expression "in oculo" in the eye, this should make the problem clear even to some readers less familiar with Latin or old French. I'm not sure the example should be added (I find biblical examples entertaining, but they are already well represented, which is probably justified by the shear amount of printed material, at least in older times; not sure how trustworthy this story is anyway). What makes it relevant is that it's attributed to an error in the printing process (missing/poorly readable letters on the beginning of a line or something like that) and not to a typing or typesetting error (albeit blaming the "lazy typographer" could be seen as an easy way to get out of trouble in this case). This fits well the given definition of typographical error (probably less so for typo), but it's somewhat underrepresented in the article, "printing error" also redirects here. Funny stories of arguable taste apart, my questions are if there's an article I'm missing dealing with errors in the printing process (or meaningful/deceitful ones in particular, loose analogues to “atomic typos”; a clearer link/disambiguation to it would be probably helpful in this case) and, if there isn't, if it should be created or if this article should better cover this topic. Personuser (talk) 01:38, 5 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]

In my opinion the duplication of the definite article "the" is the most common typo. Does anyone know why particularly this mistake happens so often? 46.114.142.36 (talk) 23:39, 20 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Repetition of a single world happens quite often (my guess is that it has to do with "forgetting" where you were left, because of stopping typing/writing in the middle of the sentence or distraction; it may also be more difficult to notice while fast reading). It isn't a typical "mechanical" typo and I think it's also a common copyist error, sometimes in relation with line splitting. If sourced it may actually be worth adding to the article. As for "the", it's a frequent and short world and is strongly tied to the noun, which may also play a role. Personuser (talk) 18:22, 21 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]

It's called dittography, here's a ref from textual criticism. Guess lot of this could apply to typoes, but here it would be better using something less related to copying and more to printed or digital texts and I have trouble finding something as sistematic. Personuser (talk) 19:07, 21 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]

A discussion is taking place to address the redirect