The Curious Case of Increasing Misspelling Rates On Wikipedia

An anonymous reader writes "The crowd-sourced nature of Wikipedia might imply that its content should be more 'correct' than other sources. As the saying goes, the more eyes the better. One particular student who was curious about this conducted rudimentary text mining on a sampling of the Wikipedia corpus to discover how misspelling rates on Wikipedia change through time. The results appear to indicate an increasing rate of misspellings through time. The author proposes that this consistent increase is the result of Wikipedia contributors using more complex language, which the test is unable to cope with. How do the results of this test compare to your own observations on the detail accuracy of massively crowd-sourced applications?"

Re:Spellink chekers. Duh!

[vawarayer]

wat u talkin aboutte?

Re:Spellink chekers. Duh!

[hairyfish]

your definately fighting a loosing battle their.

Um...

[93 Escort Wagon]

The crowd-sourced nature of Wikipedia might imply that its content should be more 'correct' than other sources.

[citation needed]

Re:Spellink chekers. Duh!

[Stormwatch]

I wish the Canadians would make their mind up. Either American or British English

...or French.

Re:Spellink chekers. Duh!

[S.O.B.]

You missed:

Maybe the same people who wont waist there time checking they're spelling also cant be bothered to use the write word. ;-)

Lol

[lightknight]

It's sad. Through all this web content, I am slowly unlearning how to spell or use proper grammar.

English teachers / professors (with a few exceptions) used to be my arch-enemies (as a math / science person) and wished them all a pleasant, if sudden, death for their batshit-insane insistence on making mountains out of molehills (i before e, except after c; can't end a sentence with a preposition; this {subject}) with regards to the language, and yet lately I finding myself wishing there were more of them.

It's not fair: I've nursed some of those grudges for years!

Re:Spellink chekers. Duh!

[Culture20]

"Moot" and "moat" aren't even homophones, damnit!

"Not that there's anything wrong with that."

Re:Spellink chekers. Duh!

[The Askylist]

Don't fash yourself - the British Labour party very rarely communicates in coherent English these days. I see no reason why the transportees should differ.