Wikipedia:Typo Team

The Wikipedia Typo Team is dedicated to improving the quality of Wikipedia by correcting

Except for articles with

Caution is needed when changing dialects and it takes some experience to avoid pitfalls. It is easy to make over- or under-generalizations. For instance, the endings "-ize" and "-ization" are acceptable in both British and American English. So although the suffix "-ise" is more common in Commonwealth usage than "-ize", both spellings are correct. Regardless, the use of "-ize"/"-ise" should remain consistent throughout a page.

More information about dialects can be found in the following links:

• Wikipedia:Manual of Style § National varieties of English
• American and British English spelling differences
• WP:EngvarB

Typo team members make many edits. It is always a good idea to give an edit summary after each of your edits, describing the change you made (see Help:Edit summary). If you made many fixes, you might say "spelling fixes" or "spelling cleanup". If the number of edits was small, you might list the exact words you fixed, such as "spelling Mississippi". You can also specify the exact change you made as with "spelling: lense → lens". Spelling fixes are generally marked as minor edits.

Additionally, you could simultaneously promote our project in the edit summary with a small reference like "typo corrections [[Wikipedia:Typo Team]]" or "spelling Monday [[WP:TYPO]]". The shortcut WP:TYPO links to this project page.

Edit summaries are important and other editors value them when scanning the article history. Edit summary histories are also sometimes considered during user requests for Wikipedia adminship; so, making valuable edit summaries is a good habit to form.

Not all typos on Wikipedia need to be (or should be) corrected:

• Spelling errors on talk pages generally should not be fixed. It is a guideline that comments, especially of others, should not be edited. Roughly this is because it can be disruptive to the communicative process, as others may have already quoted the material. Also, talk pages are not considered part of the encyclopedia proper so there is no need to bring them up to a publishable standard. On the other hand, if you were the last to post to a talk page and made a spelling or grammatical error, there's no reason not to fix it.
• In quotes, the material being quoted may contain a typo or have archaic spelling. For typos,
  MOS:PLC says: "insignificant spelling and typographic errors should simply be silently corrected (for example, correct basicly to basically)." Archaic spelling, however, should be retained: "In direct quotations, retain dialectal and archaic spellings, including capitalization" (this is quoted from the MOS page linked above). To indicate to other editors and bots that something that appears to be an error is faithfully copied from the original, after verifying the original, put the word or phrase in either {{sic}} or {{Not a typo
  }}. Examples:
  • "{{sic|truple}} threat" renders as "truple [sic] threat" and indicates to the reader that editors have verified the error is in the original, not Wikipedia.
  • "{{not a typo|ye old bakke shoppe}}" renders as "ye old bakke shoppe" and it is assumed the reader will know the spelling is archaic. Bots will not try to spell-check this text.
• Proper names might contain apparently misspelt words that are actually correct when used as a name. For example, "
  Mackerel Beach", named after the type of fish
  , is sometimes referred to as "Mackeral Beach" in official documents.
• Some foreign words look like misspellings of English words, but are correctly spelt for that language. For example, the Dutch word for "foundation" is "
  transl
  }}.
• Constructions may be considered valid in some dictionaries and style guides (without being labelled colloquial, obsolete, local, or otherwise substandard), yet be deprecated in other such publications. Unless Wikipedia's own
  MOS:ENGVAR: If challenged, discuss a desired change on the talk page, and if consensus cannot be reached, default to the usage of the first major contributor. Especially, do not continue to make the same correction to other articles, if such a challenge has not been resolved, as this is liable to be deemed disruptive
  .

• Be alert to passages where the typos suggest that the text has been processed by an optical character recognition (OCR) program. For instance, these programs sometimes substitute numbers for letters, like "1" for "l", an error that a human would be unlikely to make. OCRed text is likely to be a copyright violation and may need to be deleted rather than fixed. See Wikipedia:Text copyright violations 101.
• Spelling mistakes in filenames in [[File:...]] and [[Image:...]] links must not be corrected, as this will break the link. You could request that the file be renamed and then correct any links to it once the rename has been performed.
• News headlines imported from
  edit protected
  }}.
• Lists generated directly from Wikidata, for example at Wikipedia:WikiProject Women in Red#By occupation from Wikidata, cannot be corrected, as the importer bot will simply re-import the bad spelling. Instead, go to Wikidata and edit the description there.
• It is a truism of Wikipedia that vandals often spell things incorrectly. If the sentence in which you find a typo is unsourced or implausible, it is worth checking the article history. Often there will be a recent edit that can simply be reverted.

From a list of articles with detected typos

• Wikipedia:Typo Team/moss#Likely misspellings by article (main listing), a very active project currently spell-checking the entire encyclopedia
• AutoWikiBrowser (AWB) with User:Uziel302/AWB cleanup.
• AutoWikiBrowser (AWB) with the TypoScan plugin
• Wikipedia:Correct typos in one click
• Lupin's Anti-vandal tool, which includes a live spell checker that checks for common typos in all newly updated articles.
• Category:Wikipedia articles needing copy edit has many articles rife with typos (maintained by our friends at the Guild of Copy Editors)
• Wikipedia:Database reports/Broken section anchors

From a list of common typos

• Wikipedia:Typo Team/moss#Likely misspellings by frequency (a-m) or Wikipedia:Typo Team/moss#Likely misspellings by frequency (n-z) has lists of the misspellings it thinks actually appear most commonly in English Wikipedia. Links to articles and "find all" searches.
• Wikipedia:Lists of common misspellings
• Find a misspelling on one of these lists, and then find English Wikipedia articles to edit using the built-in search engine at Special:Search.
  • Commonly misspelled English words (selective)
  • Wikipedia:Lists of common misspellings (comprehensive, and you can mark specific misspellings as "done" as of a today's date, to help other editors pick good typos)
  • false positives
    (so using a grammar checker on a specific article or database dump might be more useful)
  • Doubled words are common, so you can make up your own phrases like "the the" and "of of".
• Wikipedia:Adopt-a-typo – you can become the caretaker of a specific typo and declare this on your user page

In a specific article

Browser spell checking

Recent versions of all major web browsers, including

• LanguageTool – free and open source (seems to work best with short texts – use on one section at a time)
• Grammarly – proprietary but free
• Ginger from Ginger Software – limited preview, proprietary subscription software
• Scribens

Utilities/scripts

• AutoWikiBrowser has RegExTypoFix built in
• The in-browser text editor wikEd can be customized to use RegExTypoFix.

External text editor

It is possible to select text in the edit box (up to a whole article), then copy and paste it into a local program, edit it, and copy and paste back again. For example, this may simplify alphabetical sorting of list items. However, this depends upon the character set being supported; for example, copying into a standard installation of LibreOffice Writer is likely to be successful, but Windows Notepad is likely to corrupt characters, particularly non-English ones. This will not cause trouble so long as you preview and/or compare the pasted-back text with the original before saving. A quick once-and-for-all check that an editing program is suitable is to copy a page with, say, Chinese characters to the local application, maybe change one letter, save locally and re-open, copy back to the WP edit page, and check changes.

The following online tools can be used if you are unsure of how a word is spelled.

• SpellCheck.net
• Spell Checker

Userbox

There is a userbox to show that you are a member of the Typo Team:

Add {{User Typo Team}} to show the project userbox on your user page. Note the bold "Wikipedia Typo Team" in the userbox above will be a link to this project page when used on your user page. The original userbox was designed by Galaxiaad and may still be used using the old {{User:Galaxiaad/typo}}.

There are also userboxes for those who have adopted a typo, which can be found here.

Pledges

If you want, you can make a typo correction pledge on the pledges page.

Work completed

You can show your support by discussing your work completed at the works completed page.

Barnstars

If you feel like someone has done exceptional work, you can reward them with one of these.

Image	What to type
	{{subst:Typo Team Barnstar|message ~~~~}}.
	{{subst:Typo Team Medal|message ~~~~}}.

Banner ads

There are also some "ad"-style banner images to promote the Typo Team located at Wikipedia:Typo Team/ads.

• Wikipedia:Adopt-a-typo
• Wikipedia:AutoWikiBrowser/Typos
• Wikipedia:Correct typos in one click
• Wikipedia:How to copy-edit
• Wikipedia:Maintenance
• Wikipedia:Lists of common misspellings
• Wikipedia:List of redirects from misspellings—obsolete
• Wikipedia:Typo Team/moss
• Wikipedia:WikiProject Check Wikipedia
• Wikipedia:WikiProject Fix common mistakes—includes misspelled words
• Wikipedia:WikiProject Grammar
• Wikipedia:WikiProject Guild of Copy Editors
• Wikipedia:WikiProject TypoScan
• Wikipedia:Writing better articles#Pay attention to spelling

• Common Errors in English Usage